Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/61

 having been under scrutiny from a shrewd pair of eyes that stared out through the shuttered grille-work of the door itself. Then he sighed heavily, and was about to ring for the third time, when the door opened and he found himself confronted by a large negress who, while arrayed in a costume that was unmistakably Oriental, still bore many of the earmarks of Eighth Avenue origin.

"Madame Fatichiara?" the visitor ventured, with a timid glance at the imperturbable turbaned figure.

The negress solemnly nodded, stepped aside and motioned for him to advance. This movement was made with an arm far too athletic to be lightly disregarded. Then the door was closed behind him, and another door at the rear, suggestively presided over by a stuffed owl with two small ruby lights set in its head, was silently opened.

The visitor sidled in past a screen embossed with a skull-and-cross-bones surrounded by an ample parade of what appeared to be interlocked copperheads worked in lemon-yellow. Then he edged about a bowl of goldfish suspended from a black tripod and found himself confronted by a silent and motionless woman in an ebony-black peignoir.

This woman sat behind a table draped with black