XXIII Girls, Girls! Nothing but Girls!

XXIV Flight

XXV Terror

XXVI The Face in the Window

BOOK IV--NEMESIS

XXVII From Lips Long Silent

XXVIII "Romantic! Too Romantic!"

XXIX A Strong Man

XXX The Creeping Shadow

XXXI Confronted

XXXII "Why Is that Here?"

XXXIII Again the Cuckoo-Clock

XXXIV The Bud--Then the Deadly Flower

BOOK I

A PROBLEM OF THE FIRST ORDER

I

"LET SOME ONE SPEAK!"

The hour of noon had just struck, and the few visitors still lingering
among the curiosities of the great museum were suddenly startled by the
sight of one of the attendants running down the broad, central staircase,
loudly shouting:

"Close the doors! Let no one out! An accident has occurred, and nobody's
to leave the building."

There was but one person near either of the doors, and as he chanced to
be a man closely connected with the museum,--being, in fact, one of its
most active directors,--he immediately turned about and in obedience to a
gesture made by the attendant, ran up the marble steps, followed by some
dozen others.

At the top they all turned, as by common consent, toward the left-hand
gallery, where in the section marked II, a tableau greeted them which few
of them will ever forget.

I say "tableau" because the few persons concerned in it stood as in a
picture, absolutely motionless and silent as the dead. Sense, if not
feeling, was benumbed in them all, as in another moment it was benumbed
in the breasts of these new arrivals. Tragedy was there in its most
terrible, its most pathetic, aspect. The pathos was given by the
victim,--a young and pretty girl lying face upward on the tessellated
floor with an arrow in her breast and death stamped unmistakably on every
feature,--the terror by the look and attitude of the woman they saw
kneeling over her--a remarkable woman, no longer young, but of a presence
to hold the attention, even if the circumstances had been of a far less
tragic nature. Her hand was on the arrow but she had made no movement to
withdraw it, and her eyes, fixed upon space, showed depths of horror
hardly to be explained even by the suddenness and startling character
of the untoward fatality of which she had just been made the unhappy
witness.

The director, whose name was Roberts, thought as he paused on the edge of
the crowd that he had never seen a countenance upon which woe had stamped
so deep a