ightly longer than the one
he had used aforetime for a similar purpose--and he unscrewed the
solitary screw and raised the lid of the coffin, letting all the screws
roll off it with a great rattle.... An overwhelming rush of chloroform
vapour escaped.... She lay within, dressed in her black dress, and her
dress had been crammed into the coffin hastily, madly, and was thrust
down in thick, disorderly folds about her feet, and her hair half
covered her face. And her face was slightly flushed, and her eyelids
quivered, and the cheeks were warm. He put his hands under her armpits
and wrenched her out and carried her from the vault. And then he sank to
the ground sobbing.

What caused him to sob? If any man dared now to ask him, and if he dared
to answer, he might reply that it was not grief nor joy, nor the
reaction from an intolerable strain, but simply the idea of the terrific
and heart-breaking cruelty of Ravengar which had dragged from him a sob.

The path followed by the madman's brain was easy to pursue once the clue
found. He had been cheated into the belief that Camilla's body rested in
that coffin, and when he had discovered that it did not rest there he
had determined that the mistake should be rectified, the false made
true. That had seemed to him logical and just. She was supposed to be
in the coffin; she should really be in the coffin; she should be forced
and jammed into it. And his lunatic and inhuman fancy had added even to
that conception. She should be drugged and carried to the vault, and
drugged again, and then immured, unconscious, but alive; and if by
chance she awoke from the chloroform sleep after he had finished
screwing in the screws, so much the better! So it was that his mind had
worked. And the scheme had been executed with that courage, that
calmness, that audacity, that minute attention to detail, of which only
madmen at their maddest appear to be capable. Beyond any question the
scheme would have succeeded had not Hugo, the moment Albert Shawn
uttered the word 'cemetery,' perceived the general trend of it in a
single wondrous flash of intuition. He had guessed it, and even while
afraid to believe that he was right, had known absolutely and
convincingly that he was right.

Camilla murmured some phrase, and gave a sigh as she lay on the
gravelled path.

She had recovered from the fatal torpor in the cool night air. He said
nothing, because he felt that he could do nothing else. Albert and S