shuddering sigh, Marshall Allerdyke drew himself up and looked round at
his surroundings.

Nothing could have been more peaceful than that quiet hotel bedroom;
nothing more orderly than its arrangements. Allerdyke had always known
his cousin for a man of unusually tidy and methodical habits; the
evidence of that orderliness was there, where he had pitched his camp for
presumably a single night. His toilet articles were spread out on the
dressing-table; his pyjamas were laid across his pillow; his open
suit-case lay on a stand at the foot of the bed; by the bedside lay his
slippers. An overcoat hung from one peg of the door; a dressing-gown
from another; on a chair in a corner lay, neatly folded, a couple of
travelling rugs. All these little details Allerdyke's sharp eyes took in
at a glance; he turned from them to the things nearer the dead man.

James Allerdyke sat in a big easy chair, placed at the side of a round
table set towards a corner of the room. He was fully dressed in a grey
tweed suit, but he had taken off one boot--the left--and it lay at his
feet on the hearthrug. He himself was thrown back against the high-padded
hood of the chair; there was a little frown on his set features, a tiny
puckering of the brows above his closed eyes. His hands were lying at his
sides, unclasped, the fingers slightly stretched, the thumbs slightly
turned inward; everything looked as if, in the very act of taking off his
boots, some sudden spasm of pain had seized him, and he had sat up,
leaned back, and died, as swiftly as the seizure had come. There was a
slight blueness under the lower rims of the eyes, a corresponding tint on
the clean-shaven upper lip, but neither that nor the pallor which had
long since settled on the rigid features had given anything of
ghastliness to the face. The dead man lay back in his chair in such an
easy posture that but for his utter quietness, his intense immobility, he
might have well been taken for one who was hard and fast asleep.

The sound of the night-porter's returning footsteps sent Allerdyke out
into the corridor. Unconsciously he shook his head and raised a hand--as
if to warn the man against noise.

"Sh!" he said, still acting and speaking mechanically. "Here's--I knew
something was wrong. The fact is, my cousin's dead!"

In his surprise the night-porter dropped the key which he had been to
fetch. When he straightened himself from picking it up, his ruddy face
had paled.

"Dead