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hern curtain.
Astolba motioned us to silence, and drew forth the jewelled knife that hung from my much bedizened girdle. With it she slit the drapery of hide that screened the opening she had made.
Then she pushed back the heavy folds, but with all caution, and stooping at a sign from her, we gazed through the rent and saw indeed the High Priest's Council Room.
Lestrade, when I had done, scanned the place also with curious eyes. Then we fell back, and Astolba, again pressing, this time a painted emblem of the moon, the huge stone slipped noiselessly into its appointed socket.
"Now," said Astolba, "I have delivered to you the Queen's message, save for this scroll, which I have been also bidden to hand to you." And she placed, I fancied a shade reluctantly, in my hand an ivory tablet.
And in the language of the people of the Walled City, I read:--
"The wiles of the Serpent shall be brought to naught. Behold, even at the twelfth hour the crystal globe shall fall, and into thy hand be delivered the secret of thine enemy. But the wisdom and the power of the lioness no man may measure. Wherefore beware! Yet walk in the light openly, despising not the good gifts of the gods, and all shall, in the day to come, be well."
The Queen's signet, the same as that cut upon the middle stone of her girdle, a hand grasping a writhing snake, was engraved on this missive, which I again read carefully, and at Lestrade's impatient asking, this time aloud.
"A precious epistle," said Gaston, with an expressive shrug; for he was nettled, I make no doubt, that the Queen's majesty had addressed itself to me rather than to him.
"What is this crystal ball of which the letter speaks?" I asked, to change, if might be, the current of my friend's thought.
"Look up," Astolba answered, "and you will behold this people's strange clock. It works, I think, by water. Every hour a ball of lead curiously and differently marked, will drop from the plate above, into the brazen bowl which you see below. At midnight a crystal ball will show you by its fall that the hour to act has come. And now I must say farewell." She smiled upon us each in turn. "Good by for a little, dear friends," she said; "be brave, be fortunate," and had gone.
After Astolba's departure we waited with what patience we might for the appointed hour. A mute, black as ebony, like his brother of the goblets, brought us a supper that did no shame to the hospitality of his royal mistress. Delicious fruits were served to us in massive silver dishes; there was, beside, a steak, from what animal I know not, that was rarely toothsome. There were flat cakes of grain and a jar of ruby-tinted wine that would have made an anchorite forswear himself. So we dined together, Lestrade and I, and little by little, a moodiness that before had wrapped us round, now fell from us like a cloak; the potent grape juice warmed us through, and we were gay.
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