surprise,
not pain for in that dying moment his emotions are fixed for ever by
the muscles of his face. He needs air and seeks it. He hurries to the
recess, kneels on the cushion, and throws open the window. Or the window
may have been already open--we cannot tell. To reach it is his last
conscious act, and in another moment he is dead. The bed is not
suspected. Why should it be? Who could prove that he had even laid down
upon it? Indeed it was believed and reported at the inquest that he had
not done so. Yet that is what unquestionably happened. Otherwise his
candle would have burned to the socket. He had blown it out and settled
to rest, be sure.

"We have now to deal with the detective, and here again there was
nothing to associate his death with the bed of the Borgia. Yet you will
see without my aid how easily he came by his death. Peter Hardcastle
desires to be alone, that he may study the Grey Room and everything in
it. He is left as he wishes, walks here and there, sketches a ground
plan of the room and exhausts its more obvious peculiarities. Would
that he had known the meaning of the golden bull! Presently he strikes
a train of thought and sits down to develop it. Or he may not have
finished with the room and have taken a seat from which he could survey
everything around him. He sits at the foot of the bed--there on the
right side. He makes his notes, then his last thoughts enter his
mind--abstract reflection on the subject of his trade. For a moment he
forgets the matter immediately in hand and writes his ideas in his book.
He has been sitting on the bed now for some while--how long we know not,
but long enough to create the heightened temperature which is all the
watchful fiend within the mattress requires to summon him. Then ascends
the spirit of death, and Hardcastle, surprised as Captain May was
surprised, leaps to his feet. He takes two or three steps forward; his
book and pen fall from his hand and he drops upon his face--a dead man.
He is, of course, still warm when Mr. Lennox finds him; but the bed he
leaped from is cold again and harmless--its work done.

"There remains the priest, the Rev. Septimus May. He neither lay on the
bed, nor sat upon it. But what did he do? He clearly knelt beside it a
long time, engaged in prayer. Nothing more natural than that he should
stretch his arms over the mattress; bury his face in his hands, and so
remain in commune with the Almighty, uttering petition after petit