I was angry because the lad did not meet me at Charing Cross!'

'Are you sure he is dead, Father?' Nella said.

'You'd better go away, Nella,' was Racksole's only reply; but the
girl stood still, and began to sob quietly. On the previous night she
had secretly made fun of Reginald Dimmock. She had deliberately
set herself to get information from him on a topic in which she
happened to be specially interested and she had got it, laughing the
while at his youthful crudities - his vanity, his transparent cunning,
his abusurd airs. She had not liked him; she had even distrusted
him, and decided that he was not 'nice'. But now, as he lay on the
stretcher, these things were forgotten. She went so far as to
reproach herself for them. Such is the strange commanding power
of death.

'Oblige me by taking the poor fellow to my apartments,' said the
Prince, with a gesture to the attendants. 'Surely it is time the doctor
came.'

Racksole felt suddenly at that moment he was nothing but a mere
hotel proprietor with an awkward affair on his hands. For a
fraction of a second he wished he had never bought the Grand
Babylon.

A quarter of an hour later Prince Aribert, Theodore Racksole, a
doctor, and an inspector of police were in the Prince's
reception-room. They had just come from an ante-chamber, in
which lay the mortal remains of Reginald Dimmock.