e stillness of the house rang the flat note of a
police-whistle. From some distant spot I heard a faint reply.

* * * * *

For long I failed to persuade myself that Isobel had not sustained
some ghastly injury from the attack of the cat-woman. Memories uprose
starkly before me of that _hlangkuna_ and the other dreadful
death-instruments of the mad Eurasian doctor. Not even the assurances
of the local medical man who had been summoned in haste could convince
me. For I recognized how petty was his knowledge in comparison with
that of Dr. Damar Greefe. But although I trembled to think what her
fate might have been if we had arrived a few minutes later, the fact
remained (and I returned thanks to Heaven) that she had escaped
serious physical injury at the hands of her assailant.

But, alas, to this very hour she sometimes awakes shrieking in the
night. And her terrified cry is always the same: "The green eyes of
Bast!... the green-eyes of Bast!"

CHAPTER XXIX

AN AFTERWORD

I wish it lay in my power to satisfy the curiosity in all quarters
expressed respecting the identity of "Nahemah"--the cat-woman, or
_psycho-hybrid_, who figured in Dr. Damar Greefe's statement. But it
is my duty, as chronicler of the strange and awful occurrences which
at this period disturbed the even tenor of my existence, to state that
from the moment in which she leaped from the window of Mrs.
Wentworth's house to the path below, neither I nor any other witness
who ever came forward _beheld her again_.

At the end of a quest which exercised the intricate machinery of New
Scotland Yard throughout the length and breadth of the land, Inspector
Gatton was compelled to admit himself defeated in this particular. And
his explanation of the failure to apprehend the central figure of the
tragedies which had exterminated the house of Coverly was a curious
one.

"You know, Mr. Addison," he said to me one evening, "the more I think
of this Nahemah the more I wonder if such a person ever really
existed!"

"What do you mean, Gatton?" I asked.

"Well," he replied, "I mean that although you and I and others are
prepared to testify to the existence of a woman in the case, what do
we really know about her (leaving Damar Greefe's statement out of the
question) except that she possessed very remarkable eyes?"

"And very remarkable agility," I interrupted.

"Yes, I'll grant you that," he said; "her agility was certa