The Mystery Megapack

between the two.
    “You have your pendant?”
    Mr. Driscoll’s suffering eye shone down on Violet Strange’s uplifted face as she advanced to say good-bye preparatory to departure.
    “Yes,” she acknowledged, “but hardly, I fear, your gratitude.”
    And the answer astonished her.
    “I am not sure that the real Alicia will not make her father happier than the unreal one has ever done.”
    “And Captain Holliday?”
    “He may come to feel the same.”
    “Then I do not quit in disgrace?”
    “You depart with my thanks.”
    When a certain personage was told of the success of Miss Strange’s latest manoeuvre, he remarked: “The little one progresses. We shall have to give her a case of prime importance next.”

KALI, by Eric Taylor
    The elaborate salaams were over. Roy Martin was waved within the house. The grin faded from his cheek and the cold fingers of depression touched him as the windowless doors of solid
    mahogany swung closed behind his entrance. It was always like that. Once he escaped from the house—and he always considered his departure an escape—the incongruity of this house of Ishan Das Babaji in an American city became absurd. But within the house, the mystical atmosphere, the locked doors, the walls of concealed steel, all gripped him with menace.
    His feet dropping soundlessly on the airy ballast of an Oriental rug, Roy crossed the dim reception hall and came to a doorway whose portières were held aside by a second Hindu servant. He entered a luxurious drawing room to wait for Margaret Miller.
    While he waited, Roy fell to musing on the strange household. Ishan Das Babaji was a suave, European-educated Bengali of high caste, with a seductive voice and a gift of easy conversation. His body was slender, lithe, and he moved with the grace of a jungle creature. His carriage and general appearance were distinctive, but the attractions of Ishan Das Babaji were offset by lips that were too thick and the bright gleam of madness that glittered always in his dark eyes.
    It was difficult for Roy to picture Margaret’s statuesque foster aunt as the wife of the Bengali. The widow of a high official of the British Government in India, shortly after the death of her husband she became fascinated by the dashing Bengali and had sacrificed friends, position, and fortune in a marriage that was the season’s scandal in Calcutta.
    Margaret Miller, twenty-two, a diminutive brunette with short, rolling black hair and cheeks of deep rose was the American of the triumvirate. She was the daughter of an American engineer, who had died in India, and was engaged to Roy Martin.
    The drapes at the doorway parted. Roy glanced up. Margaret swept into the room. A cloak was thrown over her arm. A hat was twirling on her fingers.
    “Sorry, Roy. My invitation is hereby cancelled. You’ve got to take me out to dinner. I can’t stand this place.” Her lips were smiling, but she held Roy’s hand in a grip of nervous intensity and her flashing eyes held a tremulous quality Roy had never before seen in them.
    “You bet, Marge, this snake charmer’s palace always gives me the horrors anyway,” Roy laughed.
    They strode toward the doorway and the drapes were drawn aside by an unseen servant. The great solid doors swung open. Passing into the outdoors, Roy charged his lungs with air. There was a stifling oppression to the atmosphere of that house.
    Margaret glanced into Roy’s eyes and laughed softly. “Feels good out here, what? How’d you like to live there?”
    “I wouldn’t,” Roy answered shortly.
    They came to Roy’s car. Margaret stretched out her tiny body. “And sometimes, Roy, I think that I can’t go on with it. Sometimes I feel that I can’t stay in there another minute. I want to run screaming from the door. I am haunted with a terrible obsession that.… Oh, Roy, I’m being silly. Why didn’t you shut me up? Take me somewhere gay for dinner.”
    Roy bribed his way to a table on a balcony at the Palm Court. Margaret perversely shook her head at Roy’s invitation to dance.
    “Marge, I’ve begged you to leave that house. Come on, say the word, we can be married early in the morning.
    She shook her head. “I can’t do that, Roy. You know I can’t. We must wait until I’m twenty-three. Aunt Elizabeth is my guardian. Under the terms of my father’s will I can’t get married without her consent until my twenty third birthday.…”
    “‘Aunt Elizabeth’!” Roy cut in. “Why do you call