he
glasses--the chauffeur was bound hand and foot in a chair. One of the
glasses was EMPTY; the other was still significantly full.

Jimmie Dale, with a violent effort at self-control, leaned forward.

The man in the chair was dead.

CHAPTER IV

THE INNOCENT BYSTANDER

There was not a sound. That stillness, weird, unnerving, that permeated,
as it were, everywhere through that mysterious house, was, if that were
possible, accentuated now. The four masked men in evening dress, five
including their leader, for the man who had appeared in that other room
with the rabbit was not here, were as silent, as motionless, as the dead
man who was lashed there in the chair. And to Jimmie Dale it seemed at
first as though his brain, stunned and stupefied at the shock, refused
its functions, and left him groping blindly, vaguely, with only a
sort of dull, subconscious realisation of menace and a deadly peril,
imminent, hanging over him.

He tried to rouse himself mentally, to prod his brain to action, to
pit it in a fight for life against these self-confessed criminals and
murderers with their mask of culture, who surrounded him now. Was there
a way out? What was it the Tocsin had said--"the most powerful and
pitiless organisation of criminals the world has ever known--the stake a
fortune of millions--her life!" There had, indeed, been no overemphasis
in the words she had used! They had taken pains themselves to make that
ominously clear, these men! Every detail of the strange house, with its
luxurious furnishings, its cleverly contrived appointments, breathed
a horribly suggestive degree of power, a deadly purpose, and an
organisation swayed by a master mind; and, grim evidence of the
merciless, inexorable length to which they would go, was the ghastly
white face of the dead chauffeur, bound hand and foot, in the chair
before him!

That EMPTY glass in the hand of one of the men! He could not take his
eyes from it--except as his eyes were drawn magnetically to that FULL
glass in the hand of one of the others. What height of sardonic irony!
He was to drink that other glass, to die because he refused to answer
questions that for years, with every resource at his command, risking
his liberty, his wealth, his name, his life, with everything that he
cared for thrown into the scales, he had struggled to solve--and failed!

And then the leader spoke.

"Mr. Dale," he said, with cold significance, "I regret to admit that
your