discovered. The shouting voices which bayed the alarm brought other guards to the chase. Jenkins came to a sliding halt as he made a turn in the corridor. The grin was still wide on his lips when his capturers brought him back to face Lucretia.

"I find it unseemly," she said as the guards forced him into a chair, "that a guest should feel so strongly about not wanting my hospitality. Surely, I have not been amiss in my attentions? If so, I must remedy that."

A roar of laughter went up at the words.

"Therefore," she went on, "we will do more than we have. Take him below and make him feel as welcome as he should have felt from the beginning."

Sweat streamed from the dank walls. Feeble light came from a pair of torches set into wall brackets, light which was offset by the heavy smoke the resinous torches gave forth. A dozen cloaked figures stood around the almost naked figure of a man chained wrists, ankles, and neck to the wall. Standing directly in front of the chained man, and facing him, was another man, with a look of cunning cruelty on his face. The one chained to the wall was Jenkins; and the man facing him was Griffin.

"Look, my friend," Lucretia Borgia said to Griffin, "all about you are the implements of the trade. Here," she pointed with daintily gesturing fingers to a many-thonged whip, "is a tickler to make this fool dance. And when he tires, why here," she pointed to something which looked like a coal scuttle, "we have a bucket in which he can rest his wearied feet. Of course you may have to heat it a trifle, but I'm sure he won't mind."

The others shouted in glee at the humor they found in her remark.

Jenkins listened in bitter silence. The only visible sign of his desperate feelings was a tiny trickle of blood which seeped from one corner of his mouth and ran down to the side of his chin. He had given up straining against the steel chains which bound him. They had been set too strongly into the wall. He prayed that he could take the physical tortures to be inflicted on him without weakening.

Then Griffin was reaching for the steel-tipped whip, and Jenkins braced himself for the pain.

"Make him dance!" Lucretia commanded. "Pride needs music...." She stopped suddenly and her head came up. The others also froze into listening attitudes.

Jenkins had been aware of the odd 

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