were of a skeletonic leanness which made one wonder whether the doctor had sought to symbolize in them the anatomical models of his college years. Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Boupa priests which he chose to give them, was grotesque in the highest degree; and there was an unsmiling silence and stiffness in their motions which enhanced their air of fantasy and gave Georgina a queer, awed feeling of having stumbled into the pages of _Vathek_ or the _Arabian Nights_.

But queerest of all was the general factotum or clinic-man, whom Clarendon addressed as Surama, and whom he had brought back with him after a long stay in Northern Africa, during which he had studied certain odd intermittent fevers among the mysterious Saharan Tuaregs, whose descent from the primal race of lost Atlantis is an old archeological rumor. Surama, a man of great intelligence and seemingly in exhaustible erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Tibetan servants; with swarthy, parchmentlike skin drawn so tightly over his bald pate and hairless face that every line of the skull stood out in ghastly prominence--this death's-head effect being heightened by lusterlessly burning black eyes set with a depth which left to common visibility only a pair of dark, vacant sockets. Unlike the ideal subordinate, he seemed despite his impassive features to spend an effort in concealing such emotions as he possessed. Instead, he carried about an insidious atmosphere of irony or amusement, accompanied at certain moments by a deep, guttural chuckle like that of a giant turtle which has just torn to pieces some furry animal and is ambling away toward the sea. His race appeared to be Caucasian, but could not be classified more closely than that. Some of Clarendon's friends thought he looked like a high-caste Hindoo notwithstanding his accent-less speech, while many agreed with Georgina--who disliked him--when she gave her opinion that a Pharaoh’s mummy, if miraculously brought to life, would form a very apt twin for this sardonic skeleton.

Dalton, absorbed in his up-hill political battles and isolated from Eastern interests through the peculiar self-sufficiency of the old West, had not followed the meteoric rise of his former comrade; Clarendon had actually heard nothing of one so far outside his chosen world of science as the governor. Being of independent and even of abundant means, the Clarendons had for many years stuck to their old Manhattan mansion in East Nineteenth Street; whose ghosts must have looked sorely askance at the bizarrerie of Surama and the Tibetans. Then, through the doctor's wish to transfer his base of medical observation, the great change had suddenly come, and they had crossed the continent to take up 

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