dently something inside which
excited the popular curiosity, and fed the popular appetite for horror.

I should have walked on to the church if the conversation of two men
and a woman on the outskirts of the crowd had not caught my ear. They
had just come out from seeing the sight in the Morgue, and the account
they were giving of the dead body to their neighbours described it as
the corpse of a man--a man of immense size, with a strange mark on his
left arm.

The moment those words reached me I stopped and took my place with the
crowd going in. Some dim foreshadowing of the truth had crossed my
mind when I heard Pesca's voice through the open door, and when I saw
the stranger's face as he passed me on the stairs of the hotel. Now
the truth itself was revealed to me--revealed in the chance words that
had just reached my ears. Other vengeance than mine had followed that
fated man from the theatre to his own door--from his own door to his
refuge in Paris. Other vengeance than mine had called him to the day
of reckoning, and had exacted from him the penalty of his life. The
moment when I had pointed him out to Pesca at the theatre in the
hearing of that stranger by our side, who was looking for him too--was
the moment that sealed his doom. I remembered the struggle in my own
heart, when he and I stood face to face--the struggle before I could
let him escape me--and shuddered as I recalled it.

Slowly, inch by inch, I pressed in with the crowd, moving nearer and
nearer to the great glass screen that parts the dead from the living at
the Morgue--nearer and nearer, till I was close behind the front row of
spectators, and could look in.

There he lay, unowned, unknown, exposed to the flippant curiosity of a
French mob! There was the dreadful end of that long life of degraded
ability and heartless crime! Hushed in the sublime repose of death, the
broad, firm, massive face and head fronted us so grandly that the
chattering Frenchwomen about me lifted their hands in admiration, and
cried in shrill chorus, "Ah, what a handsome man!" The wound that had
killed him had been struck with a knife or dagger exactly over his
heart. No other traces of violence appeared about the body except on
the left arm, and there, exactly in the place where I had seen the
brand on Pesca's arm, were two deep cuts in the shape of the letter T,
which entirely obliterated the mark of the Brotherhood. His clothes,
hung above him, showed that he