membered I had forgotten to lock
the door.

CHAPTER V

THE LADY OF THE VOS IN'T TUINTJE

Here was Destiny knocking at the door. In that instant my mind was made
up. For the moment, at any rate, I had every card in my hands. I would
bluff these stodgy Huns: I would brazen it out: I would be Semlin and go
through with it to the bitter end, aye, and if it took me to the very
gates of Hell.

The knocking was repeated.

"May one come in?" said a woman's voice in German.

I stepped across the corpse and opened the door a foot or so.

There stood a woman with a lamp. She was a middle-aged woman with an
egg-shaped face, fat and white and puffy, and pale, crafty eyes. She was
in her outdoor clothes, with an enormous vulgar-looking hat and an
old-fashioned sealskin cape with a high collar. The cape which was
glistening with rain was half open, and displayed a vast bosom tightly
compressed into a white silk blouse. In one hand she carried an oil
lamp.

"Frau Schratt," she said by way of introduction, and raised the lamp to
look more closely at me.

Then I saw her face change. She was looking past me into the room, and I
knew that the lamplight was falling full upon the ghastly thing that lay
upon the floor.

I realized the woman was about to scream, so I seized her by the wrist.
She had disgusting hands, fat and podgy and covered with rings.

"Quiet!" I whispered fiercely in her ear, never relaxing my grip on her
wrist. "You will be quiet and come in here, do you understand?"

She sought to shrink from me, but I held her fast and drew her into the
room.

She stood motionless with her lamp, at the head of the corpse. She
seemed to have regained her self-possession. The woman was no longer
frightened. I felt instinctively that her fears had been all for
herself, not for that livid horror sprawling on the floor. When she
spoke her manner was almost business-like.

"I was told nothing of this," she said. "Who is it? What do you want me
to do?"

Of all the sensations of that night, none has left a more unpleasant
odour in my memory than the manner of that woman in the chamber of
death. Her voice was incredibly hard. Her dull, basilisk eyes, seeking
in mine the answers to her questions, gave me an eerie sensation that
makes my blood run cold whenever I think of her.

Then suddenly her manner, arrogant, insolent, cruel, changed. She became
polite. She was obsequious. Of the two, the first manner became her