rtenaye Abbey--flashed into my
eyes. They flashed so brightly that they set me on fire. I wakened from
the nightmare with a start. A strong light dazzled me, and, striking my
face, lit up another face as well. Just for an instant I saw it; then
the revealing ray died into darkness. But on my retina was photographed
those features, in a pale, illumined circle.

A second sufficed to bring back to my brain this old dream and the
waking reality which followed, that night at the Abbey, long ago--the
night which Shelagh and I called "Spy Night." For here, in my cabin on
the yacht _Naiad_, on the crushed pillow of my bed, was that face.

As I realized this, without benefit of any doubt, a faint sickness swept
over me. It was partly horror of the past; partly physical disgust of
the brandy-reek--stronger than ever now--hanging like an unseen canopy
over the bed; and partly cold fear of a terrifying Presence.

There she lay, sunk in drugged and drunken sleep, the Woman of Mystery,
in whose existence no one but Shelagh and I had ever quite believed: the
woman who had visited us in our sleep, and who--almost certainly--had
fired the Abbey, hoping that we and the Barlows might suffocate in our
beds.

The face was just the same as it had been then: "beautiful and hideous
at the same time, like Medusa," I had described it; only now it was
older, and though still beautiful, somehow _ravaged_. The hair still
glowed with the vivid auburn colour which I had thought "unreal
looking"; but now it was tumbled and unkempt. Loose locks strayed over
the dainty pillow, and at the bottom of the bed, pushed tightly against
the footboard by a pair of untidy, high-heeled shoes, was a dusty black
toque half covered with a very thick motor-veil of gray tissue. There
was a gray cloak, too, in a tumbled mass on the pink coverlet, and a
pair of soiled gloves. Everything about the sleeper was sordid and
repulsive, a shuddering contrast to the exquisite freshness of the bed
and room--everything, that is, except the face. Its half-wrecked beauty
was still supreme, and even in the ruin drink or drugs had wrought, it
forced admiration.

"_A German spy_--here in my cabin--on board Roger Fane's yacht!" I said
the words slowly in my mind, not with my tongue. Not a sound, not the
faintest whisper, passed my lips. Yet suddenly the long, dark lashes on
bruise-blue lids began to quiver. It was as if my _thought_ had shaken
the woman by the shoulder, and roused