been
peering at me through the carving in the screen, and that he still was
doing so. I moved my feet noisily on the floor and said tentatively, 'I
beg your pardon.'

"There was no reply, and the hand did not stir. Apparently the man
was bent upon ignoring me, but as all I wished was to apologize for my
intrusion and to leave the house, I walked up to the alcove and peered
around it. Inside the screen was a divan piled with cushions, and on the
end of it nearer me the man was sitting. He was a young Englishman with
light yellow hair and a deeply bronzed face.

"He was seated with his arms stretched out along the back of the divan,
and with his head resting against a cushion. His attitude was one of
complete ease. But his mouth had fallen open, and his eyes were set with
an expression of utter horror. At the first glance I saw that he was
quite dead.

"For a flash of time I was too startled to act, but in the same flash I
was convinced that the man had met his death from no accident, that he
had not died through any ordinary failure of the laws of nature. The
expression on his face was much too terrible to be misinterpreted. It
spoke as eloquently as words. It told me that before the end had come he
had watched his death approach and threaten him.

"I was so sure he had been murdered that I instinctively looked on the
floor for the weapon, and, at the same moment, out of concern for my
own safety, quickly behind me; but the silence of the house continued
unbroken.

"I have seen a great number of dead men; I was on the Asiatic Station
during the Japanese-Chinese war. I was in Port Arthur after the
massacre. So a dead man, for the single reason that he is dead, does not
repel me, and, though I knew that there was no hope that this man was
alive, still for decency's sake, I felt his pulse, and while I kept my
ears alert for any sound from the floors above me, I pulled open his
shirt and placed my hand upon his heart. My fingers instantly touched
upon the opening of a wound, and as I withdrew them I found them wet
with blood. He was in evening dress, and in the wide bosom of his
shirt I found a narrow slit, so narrow that in the dim light it was
scarcely discernable. The wound was no wider than the smallest blade of
a pocket-knife, but when I stripped the shirt away from the chest and
left it bare, I found that the weapon, narrow as it was, had been long
enough to reach his heart. There is no need to tell you how I fel