hed his hand to the knob, and opened it.

Though his mouth opened for a cry of terror, no sound came from him as
he staggered back, and a waiting figure pitched into the room, rushed
wildly past him with a whimper like that of a wounded animal, and flung
itself, face forward, into the empty chair.

As if through the same doorway that had given entrance to the desperate
wretch, his terror seemed to leave him. While he stood gasping, with
pounding heart, staring at the limp, shuddering manhood that had hurled
itself into his home, Henry Montagu suddenly felt himself a man again.

With the cold plunge of his senses into rationality, they told him that
he was in the presence of some fatal and soul-sickening tragedy, yet
this horror that had dashed into the hollow privacy of his house was at
least real to him. Overwhelmed as he was by the frightful appearance of
the young man, who was now weeping abandonedly, he had no fear of him,
and his first act was a practical one--he swiftly, quietly closed the
door. It was done in an instinct of protection. It would be useless to
question him yet, but that he was a fugitive, and from something
hideous, Montagu took for granted.

He stood looking across the room at his outlandish guest, trying to
docket the kaleidoscopic flock of impressions that had flown into his
mind from the instant he swung back the door. Though noble, even
splendid in its slender lines, the youth's figure had half-fallen,
half-sprung through the doorway, animal-like. There had not been even a
ghost of sound in the hallway, yet it was as if he had been in the act
of hurtling himself against the closed door, hammering at it with
upraised hands. Mr. Montagu had been horrified by it instantaneously, as
by a thing of violence with every suggestion of the sordid, but the poor
sobbing fellow who now lay in the chair with his arms and head drooping
over the big leather arm seemed to him as immaculately dressed as
himself. Remembering the fleeting posture at the door, his eyes went
involuntarily to the hanging, graphic hands. In the light of his
reading-lamp they gleamed white, and as he watched, his heart sinking
with pity at their thinness, two slow red drops rolled from under the
cuffs down the palms, and fell to the floor.

"Good God!" breathed Henry Montagu.

He had never doubted for the fraction of a second that his guest was a
criminal, and in every sense a desperate one, but, just as
instinctively, he felt c