ak would help toward the identification and unless
the hag's crew had abstracted it, it would be forthcoming, he doubted
not.

Indeed, elevated on her perch, able to see the faces of all around her,
the hag's aged but brilliant eyes rapidly scanned those nearest her in
wider and wider circles. All at once they became fixed upon Claudius,
and by instinct, the neighbors fell away from him so that he was
isolated. She extended her arm with an unnatural vigor, and in a voice
also unexpectedly strong with malice, cried:

"That is he! there you have the slayer of poor Major von Sendlingen!"

At that very moment, a shrill, ear-splitting whistle sounded; and the
gas-jets all over the hall went out too simultaneously for the act not
to be that of a hand at the inlet from the street-main. Claudius heard
the soldiers and policemen buffeting the people to scramble over the
benches toward him. He had but a single road to a possible escape: by
the little door in the wall through which Rebecca Daniels had ushered
him into the auditorium. He stooped as he turned, to elude any
outstretched hands, drove himself like a wedge through the compacted
mass of frightened spectators and, spite of the gloom, the deeper
because of the glare preceding it, he reached the egress. The
uninitiated would never have suspected its existence, for the actors and
staff of the establishment alone had the right and knowledge to use it.

"Lights, lights!" the functionaries were shouting.

By the time matches were struck and lanterns brought into the scene of
confusion, Claudius had opened the panel, leaped through and closed it.
He did not dally in the passage, but hastened to follow the walled-in
road as well as he might by which he had penetrated the theatrical
region.

At the dividing-line, where the path parted to the men's and to the
ladies' dressing-rooms, he perceived a ghostly figure in the obscurity
which also prevailed here from the general extinction of the illuminant.
He was about shrinking back and fleeing in another direction when eyes
blazed in the dark like a cat's, and the sweet, unmistakable voice of
the singer, who had enthralled him, ejaculated:

"As God lives, it is you!"

"Suppose it is I!" he returned, impatiently. "Stand aside, or--"

"You must not pass here!" she returned, laying her hands on his lifted
arm.

"Must not? We shall see about that!" and he repulsed her violently.

"No, no; you are too hasty! I mean that would b