ic records in the safe; if not, you are to
destroy the phonographic records.

Do I seem gay, Polycarp?

I ought to be. I have carried through my scheme. I have outwitted
Ravengar. I have saved Camilla from death at his hands. I can look
forward to an idyll--brief, perhaps, but ecstatic--in a villa with the
loveliest view on all the Mediterranean. I ought to be gay. And yet I am
not. And it is not the knowledge of my fatal disease that saddens me.
No; I think I have been saddened by a day and a night spent with that
coffin. It is a fraud of a coffin, but it exists. And when I saw it
just now occupying the drawing-room, it gave me a sudden shock. It
somehow took hold of my imagination. I was obliged to look within, and
to touch the waxen image there. And that image seemed unholy. I did not
care to dwell on the thought of it going into the ground, with all the
solemnities of the real thing. What do you suppose will happen to that
waxen image on the Judgment Day, Polycarp? Surely, someone in authority,
possibly a steward, fussy and overworked, will exclaim: 'There is some
mistake here!' I can hear you say that I am mad, Polycarp, that Francis
Tudor was always a little 'wrong.' But I am not mad. It is only that my
brain is too agile, too fanciful. I am a great deal more sane than you,
Polycarp.

And I am trying to put some heart into myself. I am trying to make ready
to enjoy the brief ecstatic future where Camilla awaits me. But I am so
tired, Polycarp. And there's no disguising the fact that it's an awful
nuisance never to be quite sure whether you won't fall down dead the
next minute or the next second. I must go in and have another glance at
that singular swindle of a coffin.

* * * * *

The phonograph went off into an inarticulate whirr of its own
machinery. The recital was over. Tudor must have died immediately after
securing the record in the safe in his bedroom, where Hugo had just
listened to it.

'She lives!' was Hugo's sole thought.

The profound and pathetic tragedy of Tudor's career did not touch him
until long afterwards.

'She lives! Ravengar lives! Ravengar probably knows where she is, and I
do not know! And Ravengar is at large! I have set him at large.'

His mind a battlefield on which the most glorious hope struggled against
a frenzied fear, Hugo rose from the chair in front of the
phonograph-stand, and, after a slight hesitation, left the flat as he
had entered i