murmuring chorus, ascended the stairs.

"Stand back, please," rapped the physician tartly, turning upon their
following. "Will someone send for the police and ring up Scotland Yard?
This is not a peep-show."

Abashed, the curious ones fell back, and Simons and Rohscheimer went
upstairs alone. Most of the people employed in those offices left sharp
at six, but a little group of belated workers from an upper floor were
nervously peeping in at an open door bearing the words:

DOUGLAS GRAHAM

They stood aside for the doctor, who entered briskly, Rohscheimer at his
heels, and closed the door behind him. A chilly and indefinable
something pervaded the atmosphere of Moorgate Place a something that
floats, like a marsh mist, about the scene of a foul deed.

The outer office was in darkness, as was that opening off it on the
left; but out from the inner sanctum poured a flood of light.

Douglas Graham's private office was similar to the private offices of a
million other business men, but on this occasion it differed in one
dread particular.

Stretched upon the fur rug before the American desk lay a heavily built
figure, face downward. It was that of a fashionably dressed man, one who
had been portly, no longer young, but who had received a murderous
thrust behind the left shoulder-blade, and whose life had ebbed in the
grim red stream that stained the fur beneath him.

With a sharp glance about him, the doctor bent, turned the body and made
a rapid examination. He stood up almost immediately, shrugging slightly.

"Dead!"

Julius Rohscheimer wiped his forehead with the Cambridge silk.

"Poor Graham! How long?" he said huskily.

"Roughly, half an hour."

"Look! look! On the desk!"

The doctor turned sharply from the body and looked as directed.

Stuck upright amid the litter of papers was a long, curved dagger, with
a richly ornamented hilt. Several documents were impaled by its crimson
point, and upon the topmost the following had roughly and shakily been
printed:

"VENGENCE IS MINE!
"SEVERAC BABLON."

Dr. Simons started perceptibly, and looked about the place with a sudden
apprehension. It seemed to Julius Rohscheimer that his face grew pale.

In the eerie silence of the dead man's room they faced one another.

The doctor, his straight brows drawn together, looked, again and again,
from the ominous writing to the poor, lifeless thing on the rug.

"Then, indeed, his sins were great," he w