t. Am I right, sir?"

The host bowed.

"The fumes, whatever they were, killed swiftly?"

"They did. Instantly; mercifully. Too mercifully."

"How could you know it was fumes?" demanded Mr. Thomas Colvin McIntyre.

"By the dead flies, the effect upon the bell-boy, and the fact that
no wound was found on the body. Then, too, there was the fulminate of
mercury shell."

"Of what possible use was that?" asked Professor Gehren.

"A question that I've asked myself, sir, a great many times over in
the last twenty-four hours. Perhaps Mr. Smith could answer that best.
Though--er--I think the shell was blown through the blowpipe to clear
the deadly fumes from the room by its explosion, before any one else
should suffer. Smith is, at least, not a wanton slaughterer."

"You are right, sir, and I thank you," said the foreigner. He drew
himself up weakly but with pride. "Gentlemen, I am not a murderer. I am
an avenger. It would have gone hard with my conscience had any innocent
person met death through me. As for that Turkish dog, you shall judge
for yourself whether he did not die too easily."

From among the papers in a tiroir against the wall he took a French
journal, and read, translating fluently. The article was a bald account
of the torture, outrage and massacre of Armenian women and girls,
at Adana, by the Turks. The most hideous portion of it was briefly
descriptive of the atrocities perpetrated by order of a high Turkish
official upon a mother and two young daughters. "An Armenian prisoner,
being dragged by in chains, went mad at the sight," the correspondent
stated.

"I was that prisoner," said the reader. "The official was Telfik Bey. I
saw my naked daughter break from the soldiers and run to him, pleading
for pity, as he sat his horse; and I saw him strike his spur into her
bare breast. My wife, the mother of my children--"

"Don't!" The protest came from the Fifth Assistant Secretary of State.

He had risen. His smooth-skinned face was contracted, and the sweat
stood beaded on his forehead. "I--I can't stand it. I've got my duty to
do. This man has made a confession."

"Your pardon," said the foreigner. "I have lived and fed on and slept
with that memory, ever since. On my release I left my country. The
enterprise of which I had been the head, dye-stuff manufacturing, had
interested me in chemistry. I went to England to study further. Thence I
came to America to wait."

"You have heard his confession, al