too: a man with black eyebrows, serious eyes, and a
meaningless sort of smile underneath--the Chamberlain, I say, discovered
there was everything there except the Prince himself. He searched all
the outer salons; then, remembering the man's mad fits of fear, hurried
to the inmost chamber. That also was empty, but the steel turret or
cabin erected in the middle of it took some time to open. When it did
open it was empty, too. He went and looked into the hole in the ground,
which seemed deeper and somehow all the more like a grave--that is his
account, of course. And even as he did so he heard a burst of cries and
tumult in the long rooms and corridors without.

"First it was a distant din and thrill of something unthinkable on the
horizon of the crowd, even beyond the castle. Next it was a wordless
clamour startlingly close, and loud enough to be distinct if each word
had not killed the other. Next came words of a terrible clearness,
coming nearer, and next one man, rushing into the room and telling the
news as briefly as such news is told.

"Otto, Prince of Heiligwaldenstein and Grossenmark, was lying in the
dews of the darkening twilight in the woods beyond the castle, with his
arms flung out and his face flung up to the moon. The blood still pulsed
from his shattered temple and jaw, but it was the only part of him that
moved like a living thing. He was clad in his full white and yellow
uniform, as to receive his guests within, except that the sash or scarf
had been unbound and lay rather crumpled by his side. Before he could
be lifted he was dead. But, dead or alive, he was a riddle--he who had
always hidden in the inmost chamber out there in the wet woods, unarmed
and alone."

"Who found his body?" asked Father Brown.

"Some girl attached to the Court named Hedwig von something or other,"
replied his friend, "who had been out in the wood picking wild flowers."

"Had she picked any?" asked the priest, staring rather vacantly at the
veil of the branches above him.

"Yes," replied Flambeau. "I particularly remember that the Chamberlain,
or old Grimm or somebody, said how horrible it was, when they came up
at her call, to see a girl holding spring flowers and bending over
that--that bloody collapse. However, the main point is that before help
arrived he was dead, and the news, of course, had to be carried back to
the castle. The consternation it created was something beyond even that
natural in a Court at the fall