y his tottering senses.
Did they not understand the stupendous mockery of their questions? Did
they not understand that he did not know? He had told them so--perhaps
he had better tell them so again.

"I--" He tried to speak, and found the words thick upon his tongue.
"I--do not--know."

The glass itself was thrust abruptly between his lips. Some of the
contents spilled and trickled upon his chin, and then a flood of it,
burning, fiery, poured down his throat. A flood of it--and it needed but
THREE drops and there had been TEN in the glass!

So this was death--a hazy, nebulous thing! There was no pain. It was
like--like--nothingness. And out of the nothingness SHE came. Strange
that she should come! Alone she had fought these fiends and outwitted
them for--how long was it? Three years! She would be more than ever
alone now. Pray God she did not finally fall into their clutches!

How it burned now, that fatal draught they had forced down his throat,
and how it gripped at him and seemed to eat and bore its way into the
very tissues! It was the end, and--no! It was STIMULATING him! Strength
seemed to be returning to his limbs; it seemed as though he were being
carried, as though the bonds about him were being loosened; and now his
brain seemed to be growing clearer.

He roused up with a startled exclamation. He was back in the same room
in which he had first returned to consciousness after the accident. He
was on the same couch. The same masked figure was at the same desk. Had
he been dreaming? Was this then only some horrible, ghastly nightmare
through which he had passed?

No, it had been real enough; his clothes, rent and torn, and the blood
upon his hands, where the skin had been scraped from his knuckles in the
fight, bore evidence to that. He must then have lost consciousness for
a while, though it seemed to him that at no moment, hazy, irrational
though his brain might have been, had he become entirely oblivious to
what was taking place around him. And yet it must have been so!

The eyes from behind the mask were fixed steadily upon him, and below
the mask there was the hard, unpleasant set to the lips that Jimmie Dale
had grown accustomed to expect.

The man spoke abruptly.

"That you find yourself alive, Mr. Dale," he said grimly, "is no
confession of weakness upon the part of those with whom you have had to
deal here. To bear witness to that there is one who is not alive, as you
have seen. That man we