n so obvious a place. As for the wig and beard, they had been
previously seen in his room. But before he leaves the house Ul-Jabal
has one more work to do: once more the two eat and drink together as in
"the old days of love"; once more the baronet is drunken with a deep
sleep, and when he wakes, his skin is "brown as the leaves of autumn."
That is the evidence of which I spake in the beginning as giving us a
hint of the exact shade of the Oriental's colour--it was the
yellowish-brown of a sered leaf. And now that the face of the baronet
has been smeared with this indelible pigment, all is ready for the
tragedy, and Ul-Jabal departs. He will return, but not immediately, for
he will at least give the eyes of his victim time to grow accustomed to
the change of colour in his face; nor will he tarry long, for there is
no telling whether, or whither, the stone may not disappear from that
outer pocket. I therefore surmise that the tragedy took place a day or
two ago. I remembered the feebleness of the old man, his highly
neurotic condition; I thought of those "fibrillary twitchings,"
indicating the onset of a well-known nervous disorder sure to end in
sudden death; I recalled his belief that on account of the loss of the
stone, in which he felt his life bound up, the chariot of death was
urgent on his footsteps; I bore in mind his memory of his grandfather
dying in agony just seventy years ago after seeing his own wraith by
the churchyard-wall; I knew that such a man could not be struck by the
sudden, the terrific shock of seeing _himself_ sitting in the chair
before the mirror (the chair, you remember, had been _placed_ there by
Ul-Jabal) without dropping down stone dead on the spot. I was thus able
to predict the manner and place of the baronet's death--if he _be_
dead. Beside him, I said, would probably be found a white stone. For
Ul-Jabal, his ghastly impersonation ended, would hurry to the pocket,
snatch out the stone, and finding it not the stone he sought, would in
all likelihood dash it down, fly away from the corpse as if from
plague, and, I hope, straightway go and--hang himself.'

It was at this point that the black mask of Ham framed itself between
the python-skin tapestries of the doorway. I tore from him the paper,
now two days old, which he held in his hand, and under the heading,
'Sudden death of a Baronet,' read a nearly exact account of the facts
which Zaleski had been detailing to me.

'I can see by your f