t move, and the guard stepped into the carriage,
thinking that perhaps the lady was asleep. He touched her arm lightly
and looked into her face. In his own poetic language, he was 'struck all
of a 'eap.' In the glassy eyes, the ashen colour of the cheeks, the
rigidity of the head, there was the unmistakable look of death.

"Hastily the guard, having carefully locked the carriage door, summoned
a couple of porters, and sent one of them off to the police-station, and
the other in search of the station-master.

"Fortunately at this time of day the up platform is not very crowded,
all the traffic tending westward in the afternoon. It was only when an
inspector and two police constables, accompanied by a detective in plain
clothes and a medical officer, appeared upon the scene, and stood round
a first-class railway compartment, that a few idlers realized that
something unusual had occurred, and crowded round, eager and curious.

"Thus it was that the later editions of the evening papers, under the
sensational heading, 'Mysterious Suicide on the Underground Railway,'
had already an account of the extraordinary event. The medical officer
had very soon come to the decision that the guard had not been mistaken,
and that life was indeed extinct.

"The lady was young, and must have been very pretty before the look of
fright and horror had so terribly distorted her features. She was very
elegantly dressed, and the more frivolous papers were able to give their
feminine readers a detailed account of the unfortunate woman's gown, her
shoes, hat, and gloves.

"It appears that one of the latter, the one on the right hand, was
partly off, leaving the thumb and wrist bare. That hand held a small
satchel, which the police opened, with a view to the possible
identification of the deceased, but which was found to contain only a
little loose silver, some smelling-salts, and a small empty bottle,
which was handed over to the medical officer for purposes of analysis.

"It was the presence of that small bottle which had caused the report to
circulate freely that the mysterious case on the Underground Railway was
one of suicide. Certain it was that neither about the lady's person, nor
in the appearance of the railway carriage, was there the slightest sign
of struggle or even of resistance. Only the look in the poor woman's
eyes spoke of sudden terror, of the rapid vision of an unexpected and
violent death, which probably only lasted an infin