ed the stairs without heeding what noise he
made. Nevertheless his actions were never awkward or ill-timed; his
approach was not heard, his arrival on the upper landing was unnoticed.

In an instantaneous pause he looked into the rose-pink room and saw
Liane Delorme, in a negligee like a cobweb over a nightdress even more
sheer, kneeling and clawing at her throat, round which a heavy silk
handkerchief was slowly tightening; her face already purple with
strangulation, her eyes bulging from their sockets, her tongue
protruding between swollen lips.

A thick knee was planted between her shoulder-blades. The ends of the
handkerchief were in the sinewy hands of Albert Dupont.

XVII

CHEZ LIANE

Conceivably even a journeyman strangler may know the thrill of
professional pride in a good job well done: Dupont was grinning at his
work, and so intent upon it that his first intimation of any
interference came when Lanyard took him from behind, broke his hold
upon the woman (and lamentably failed to break his back at the same
time) whirled him round with a jerk that all but unsocketed an arm and,
before the thug could regain his balance, placed surely on the heel of
his jaw, just below the ear, a blow that, coming straight from the
shoulder and carrying all Lanyard had of weight and force and will to
punish, in spite of Dupont's heaviness fairly lifted him from his feet
and dropped him backwards across a chaise-longue, from which he slipped
senseless to the floor.

It was just like that, a crowded, breathless business....

With bruised and aching knuckles to prove that the blow had been one to
stun an ox, Lanyard believed it safe to count Dupont hors de combat,
for a time at least. In any event, the risk had to be chanced: Liane
Delorme was in a plight demanding immediate relief.

In all likelihood she had lost consciousness some moments before
Lanyard's intervention. Released, she had fallen positively inert, and
lay semi-prostrate on a shoulder, with limbs grotesquely slack and
awry, as if in unpleasant mimicry of a broken doll. Only the whites of
bloodshot eyes showed in her livid and distorted countenance. Arms and
legs twitched spasmodically, the ample torso was violently shaken by
labouring lungs.

The twisted handkerchief round her throat had loosened, but not enough
to give relief. Lanyard removed it, turned her over so that she lay
supine, wedged silken pillows from the chaise-longue beneath her head
an