. For the candle in the candlestick had
obviously burned itself away to nothing and left him, mentally, at
least, very completely in the dark.

"Then there is a sort of mathematical question," went on Fisher,
leaning back in his limp way and looking up at the bare walls, as if
tracing imaginary diagrams there. "It's not so easy for a man in the
third angle to face the other two at the same moment, especially if
they are at the base of an isosceles. I am sorry if it sounds like a
lecture on geometry, but--"

"I'm afraid we have no time for it," said Wilson, coldly. "If this
man is really coming back, I must give my orders at once."

"I think I'll go on with it, though," observed Fisher, staring at
the roof with insolent serenity.

"I must ask you, Mr. Fisher, to let me conduct my inquiry on my own
lines," said Wilson, firmly. "I am the officer in charge now."

"Yes," remarked Horne Fisher, softly, but with an accent that
somehow chilled the hearer. "Yes. But why?"

Sir Walter was staring, for he had never seen his rather
lackadaisical young friend look like that before. Fisher was looking
at Wilson with lifted lids, and the eyes under them seemed to have
shed or shifted a film, as do the eyes of an eagle.

"Why are you the officer in charge now?" he asked. "Why can you
conduct the inquiry on your own lines now? How did it come about, I
wonder, that the elder officers are not here to interfere with
anything you do?"

Nobody spoke, and nobody can say how soon anyone would have
collected his wits to speak when a noise came from without. It was
the heavy and hollow sound of a blow upon the door of the tower, and
to their shaken spirits it sounded strangely like the hammer of
doom.

The wooden door of the tower moved on its rusty hinges under the
hand that struck it and Prince Michael came into the room. Nobody
had the smallest doubt about his identity. His light clothes, though
frayed with his adventures, were of fine and almost foppish cut, and
he wore a pointed beard, or imperial, perhaps as a further
reminiscence of Louis Napoleon; but he was a much taller and more
graceful man that his prototype. Before anyone could speak he had
silenced everyone for an instant with a slight but splendid gesture
of hospitality.

"Gentlemen," he said, "this is a poor place now, but you are
heartily welcome."

Wilson was the first to recover, and he took a stride toward the
newcomer.

"Michael O'Neill, I arrest you in the