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Bluebeard's wives could have held a family reunion in that closet and invited all of Solomon's spouses. Finally, in desperation, I gathered all my poor garments together and hung them in a sociable bunch on the hooks nearest the door. How I should have loved to have shown that closet to a select circle of New York boarding-house landladies!

Above the town was Blackbeard's Castle; and Bluebeard's so high on the right that its guns could have levelled the city in an hour. Although not a hundred years old, and built by the Danes, both these frowning towers were museums of piratical tradition, and travellers returned to Europe with imaginations expanded.

Pausing about as long as it would have taken a lady to adjust a curl, he peeped into a Dutch cabinet of ebony and mother-of-pearl and was studying a charming creature painted on ivory, whose head like that of Bluebeard's wife was subsequently separated from her lovely shoulders, when a light footstep behind him interrupted his scrutiny.

Oh, no there can be no risk now," and the wretch added, "thank God!" The devil loves such piety as this. So Simon quietly turned the key, and set the cupboard open: it was to him a Bluebeard's chamber, a cave of the Forty Thieves, a garden of the Genius in Aladdin, a mysterious secret treasure-house of wealth uncounted and unseen.

"My strict orders were to make myself agreeable to a young woman who lives in a sort of bluebeard's house, where no visitors are allowed and smiling is prohibited." Geraldine looked across at Isabel Worth. "I never met Miss Worth before," she said. "I believe her father is wonderfully clever. Did I hear you say that you were going out of town?" Granet nodded. "I am going away for a few days.

The shutters of the window in the little room were closed, and at first she could see nothing; but as her eyes became accustomed to the dim light she saw that clotted blood covered the floor, and that hanging from the walls by their long hair were the bloody heads of Bluebeard's other wives, while on the floor lay their dead bodies.

And Marjorie seemed to have more energy and delight in running about and doing things than she had ever known she possessed, in the heavy New York air. She washed the dishes and swept out the cabin with a gay good will that surprised herself. She tried to feel like Cinderella or Bluebeard's wife or some of the oppressed heroines who had loomed large in her past, but it wasn't to be done.

A very few weeks after Bluebeard's death, however, I got a taste of revenge out of one of the race. Palliser and I were out shooting, and we found a single bull elephant asleep in the dry bed of a stream; we were stealing quietly up to him, when his guardian spirit whispered something in his ear, and up he jumped. However, we polished him off, and having reloaded, we passed on.

"You might be very much the reverse sometimes," he said, "if you knew some of the secrets I had to keep. India is India, and she can be very lurid upon occasion. There is only one way of treating her then; but I am not going to let you into any unpleasant secrets. That is Bluebeard's Chamber, and you have got to stay outside." She made a small but vehement gesture in his arms.

He inserted the key in his door, turned it, pushed the door open, and pocketed the key. He was about to enter when the bag again squirmed gently in his grip. From the days of Pandora, through the epoch of Bluebeard's wife, down to the present time, one of the chief failings of humanity has been the disposition to open things that were better closed.