ad hung suspended in space he had been shot!

"You say that someone heard the sound of the shot?" I asked suddenly.

"Several people," replied Bristol; "but no one knows, or no one
will say, from what direction it came. I shall go on with the
inquiry, of course, and cross-examine every soul in Wyatt's
Buildings. Meanwhile, I'm open to confess that I am beaten."

In the velvet sky countless points blazed tropically. The hum of
the traffic in Waterloo Road reached us only in a muffled way.
Sordidness lay beneath us, but up there under the heavens we seemed
removed from it as any Babylonian astronomer communing with the
stars.

When, some ten minutes later, I passed out into the noise of
Waterloo Road, I left behind me an unsolved mystery and took with
me a great dread; for I knew that the quest of the sacred slipper
was not ended, I knew that another tragedy was added to its history--and
I feared to surmise what the future might hold for all of us.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WOMAN WITH THE BASKET

Deep in thought respecting the inexplicable nature of this latest
mystery, I turned in the direction of the bridge, and leaving behind
me an ever-swelling throng at the gate of Wyatt's Buildings,
proceeded westward.

The death of the dwarf had lifted the case into the realms of the
marvellous, and I noted nothing of the bustle about me, for mentally
I was still surveying that hunched-up body which had fallen out of
empty space.

Then in upon my preoccupation burst a woman's scream!

I aroused myself from reverie, looking about to right and left.
Evidently I had been walking slowly, for I was less than a hundred
yards from Wyatt's Buildings, and hard by the entrance to an
uninviting alley from which I thought the scream had proceeded.

And as I hesitated, for I had no desire to become involved in a
drunken brawl, again came the shrill scream: "Help! help!"

I cannot say if I was the only passer-by who heard the cry;
certainly I was the only one who responded to it. I ran down the
narrow street, which was practically deserted, and heard windows
thrown up as I passed for the cries for help continued.

Just beyond a patch of light cast by a street lamp a scene was being
enacted strange enough at any time and in any place, but doubly
singular at that hour of the night, or early morning, in a lane off
the Waterloo Road.

An old woman, from whose hand a basket of provisions had fallen,
was struggling in the gras