, as the
exhalation rose, with scarcely a tremor he passed from sleep into death.
Needless to tell you that I kept far from him, for I guessed that not
until the poor fellow was cold would the demon in the mattress sink down
and disappear, as the effret into his bottle. Then mattress and dog were
alike harmless, as they are now. I gave him only five hours, for he was
a small, thin beast, and the heat soon left his body."

"But, signor--"

"I shall anticipate all your objections if you will listen a little
longer, dear Mrs. May. Let us sit again, and question me after I have
spoken, if any doubts remain unanswered. Another liqueur, Masters."

He sipped, and preserved silence for a few moments, while none spoke.
Then from his armchair he traversed the story of the Grey Room, and
proved amazingly familiar with the smallest detail of it. Indeed, when
at last he had finished, none could find any questions to ask. "There
are two very interesting preliminary facts to note, my friends," began
the signor. He beamed upon them, and enjoyed his own exposition with
unconcealed gusto. "The first is that a room, already suffering from
sinister traditions, and held to be haunted, should have been precisely
that into which this infernal engine of destruction was introduced. Yet
what more natural? You have the furniture, and, for the time being,
do not know what to do with it. The house is already full of beautiful
things, and these surplus treasures you store here, to be safe and out
of the way, in a room which is not put to its proper use. You are not
collectors or experts. Sir Walter's father did not share his father's
enthusiasm, neither did Sir Walter care for old furniture. So the pieces
take their place in this room, and are, more or less, forgotten.

"That is the first interesting fact, and the second seems to me to
be this: that those who perished here in living memory all died at
different places in the room, and so died that their deaths could not
be immediately and undeviatingly traced to the bed. Hardcastle, for
example, as you have related his conversation, did not associate the
death of poor Captain May with that of the lady of the hospital eleven
years before; and Sir Walter himself saw no reason to connect the still
earlier death of his aged aunt, which took place when he was a boy, with
the disaster that followed.

"Let us now examine for a moment the amazing fact that none of the
stigmata of death was found in tho