Nevertheless, after the first few minutes of relief, I found it
very lonesome upstairs. The pictures which crowded upon me of the
various groups of excited and wildly gesticulating men and women
through which we had passed on our way up, mingled themselves with
the solemn horror of the scene in the writing-room, with its
fleeting vision of youth and beauty lying pulseless in sudden death.
I could not escape the one without feeling the immediate impress of
the other, and if by chance they both yielded for an instant to
that earlier scene of a desolate Street, with its solitary lamp
shining down on the crouched figure of a man washing his shaking
hands in a drift of freshly fallen snow, they immediately rushed
back with a force and clearness all the greater for the momentary
lapse.

I was still struggling with these fancies when the door opened, and
George came in. There was news in his face as I rushed to meet him.

"Tell me--tell," I begged.

He tried to smile at my eagerness, but the attempt was ghastly.

"I've been listening and looking," said he, "and this is all I
have learned. Miss Challoner died, not from a stroke or from
disease of any kind, but from a wound reaching the heart. No one
saw the attack, or even the approach or departure of the person
inflicting this wound. If she was killed by a pistol-shot, it was
at a distance, and almost over the heads of the persons sitting at
the table we saw there. But the doctors shake their heads at the
word pistol-shot, though they refuse to explain themselves or to