It was a tremendous building, a couple of hundred feet long. One
entered into a main hall, perhaps fifty feet wide, with a great
fireplace arid staircase of marble and bronze, and furniture of
gilded wood and crimson velvet, and a huge painting, covering three
of the walls, representing the Conquest of Peru. Each of the rooms
was furnished in the style of a different period--one Louis
Quatorze, one Louis Quinze, one Marie Antoniette, and so on. There
was a drawing-room and a regal music-room; a dining-room in the
Georgian style, and a billiard-room, also in the English fashion,
with high wainscoting and open beams in the coiling; and a library,
and a morning-room and conservatory. Upstairs in the main suite of
rooms was a royal bedstead, which alone was rumoured to have cost
twenty-five thousand dollars; and you might have some idea of the
magnificence of things when you learned that underneath the gilding
of the furniture was the rare and precious Circassian walnut.

All this was beautiful. But what brought the guests to Castle Havens
was the casino, so the Major had remarked. It was really a private
athletic club--with tan-bark hippodrome, having a ring the size of
that in Madison Square Garden, and a skylight roof, and thirty or
forty arc-lights for night events. There were bowling-alloys,
billiard and lounging-rooms, hand-ball, tennis and racket-courts, a
completely equipped gymnasium, a shooting-gallery, and a
swimming-pool with Turkish and Russian baths. In this casino alone
there were rooms for forty guests.

Such was Castle Havens; it had cost three or four millions of
dollars, and within the twelve-foot wall which surrounded its
grounds lived two world-weary people who dreaded nothing so much as