h a year had passed since, in the early evening, as
Larry the Bat, he had burrowed so ironically for refuge in Chang Foo's
den--from her! It seemed like some mocking unreality, some visionary
dream that, so short a while before, he had read those words of hers
that had sent the blood coursing and leaping through his veins in mad
exultation at the thought that the culmination of the years had come,
that all he longed for, hoped for, that all his soul cried out for was
to be his--"in an hour." An HOUR--and he was to have seen her, the woman
whose face he had never seen, the woman whom he loved! And the hour
instead, the hours since then, had brought a nightmare of events so
incredible as to seem but phantoms of the imagination.

Phantoms! He sat up suddenly with a jerk. The face of the dead
chauffeur, the limp form lashed in that chair, the horrible picture in
its entirety, every detail standing out in ghastly relief, took form
before him. God knew there was no phantom there!

The man beside him, at the sudden start, lifted a hand and felt
hurriedly over the bandage across Jimmie Dale's eyes.

Jimmie Dale was scarcely conscious of the act. With that face before
him, with the scene re-enacting itself in his mind again, had come
another thought, staggering him for a moment with the new menace that it
brought. He had had neither time nor opportunity to think before; it had
been all horror, all shock when he had entered that room. But now, like
an inspiration, he saw it all from another angle. There was a glaring
fallacy in the game these men had played for his benefit to-night--a
fallacy which they had counted on glossing over, as it had, indeed, been
glossed over, by the sudden shock with which they had forced that scene
upon him; or, failing in that, they had counted on the fact that his,
or any other man's nerve would have failed when it came to open defiance
based on a supposition which might, after all, be wrong, and, being
wrong, meant death.

But it was not supposition. Either he was right now, or these men were
childish, immature fools--and, whatever else they might be, they were
not that! NOT A SINGLE DROP OF POISON HAD PASSED THE CHAUFFEUR'S LIPS.
The man had not been murdered in that room. He had not, in a sense, been
murdered at all. The man, absolutely, unquestionably, without a loophole
for doubt, had either been killed outright in the automobile accident,
or had died immediately afterward, probably without