than
any man in the gathering, and he had never showed it better than in
speaking frankly now.

"Bunk, Nopp," Van Hope answered. "You're mixing coincidence up with
atmosphere. It was a strange and a devilish thing that those two crimes
should have happened two nights running, but it will work out perfectly
plausible--mark my words. And coincidences don't happen three times in a
row."

Nopp lifted his face to the starlit skies. "My boy," he said, rather
superciliously, "_anything_ could happen at Kastle Krags."

CHAPTER XIX

After I went to my room I worked for an hour on the cryptogram, found
beside Florey's body. The mysterious column of four-letter words,
however, did not respond to any methods of translation that I knew. For
another hour thereafter I lay awake in my bed beside the window.

It was one of the few spots in the house that offered a fairly clear
glimpse of the lagoon. The trees opened, like curtains: I could see the
water darkly blue in the starlight, and the faint, gray line, like a
crayon mark, that was the natural rock wall. The tide was coming in now:
I could see the white manes of the sea-horses as they charged over the
barrier. The whole surface of the lagoon was fretted by them.

Had Nopp spoken true--could there be a recurrence of last night's
tragedy? Could any situation arise in human affairs that would result in
three murders, one after another, all under practically the same and the
most mysterious conditions? It was possible, by a long stretch of the
imagination, to conceive of two such crimes occurring on successive
nights--the murderer striking again, through some unknown movement of
events, to hide his first crime--but coincidences do not happen thrice!
If indeed these disappearances could be wholly attributed to human
activities, human designs and human passions, there was no need of lying
awake and expectant this third night. Surely no super-criminal had
declared remorseless war against _all_ of the occupants of that house.
Certainly we could sleep in peace to-night!

But I couldn't get away from the same thought that haunted me
before--that these crimes lay somehow without the bourne of human event
and circumstance, that they were some way native to this strange, old
manor-house beside the sea. It wasn't easy to lose one's self in sleep.
I felt no shame at my own uneasiness. It was true that the crimes had
both occurred, evidently, on the shore of or near the lagoon, but