here he had been brought by a stranger, who rang the
bell before going away.

As soon as the daroga recovered his strength and his wits, he sent to
Count Philippe's house to inquire after the viscount's health. The
answer was that the young man had not been seen and that Count Philippe
was dead. His body was found on the bank of the Opera lake, on the
Rue-Scribe side. The Persian remembered the requiem mass which he had
heard from behind the wall of the torture-chamber, and had no doubt
concerning the crime and the criminal. Knowing Erik as he did, he
easily reconstructed the tragedy. Thinking that his brother had run
away with Christine Daae, Philippe had dashed in pursuit of him along
the Brussels Road, where he knew that everything was prepared for the
elopement. Failing to find the pair, he hurried back to the Opera,
remembered Raoul's strange confidence about his fantastic rival and
learned that the viscount had made every effort to enter the cellars of
the theater and that he had disappeared, leaving his hat in the prima
donna's dressing-room beside an empty pistol-case. And the count, who
no longer entertained any doubt of his brother's madness, in his turn
darted into that infernal underground maze. This was enough, in the
Persian's eyes, to explain the discovery of the Comte de Chagny's
corpse on the shore of the lake, where the siren, Erik's siren, kept
watch.

The Persian did not hesitate. He determined to inform the police. Now
the case was in the hands of an examining-magistrate called Faure, an
incredulous, commonplace, superficial sort of person, (I write as I
think), with a mind utterly unprepared to receive a confidence of this
kind. M. Faure took down the daroga's depositions and proceeded to
treat him as a madman.

Despairing of ever obtaining a hearing, the Persian sat down to write.
As the police did not want his evidence, perhaps the press would be
glad of it; and he had just written the last line of the narrative I
have quoted in the preceding chapters, when Darius announced the visit
of a stranger who refused his name, who would not show his face and
declared simply that he did not intend to leave the place until he had
spoken to the daroga.

The Persian at once felt who his singular visitor was and ordered him
to be shown in. The daroga was right. It was the ghost, it was Erik!

He looked extremely weak and leaned against the wall, as though he were
afraid of falling. Taking o