for one would not have recognised him as the same being. His sepulchral
face was alight with news--it was the transformation of the undertaker's
mute into the wedding guest. And yet he had only one box of the
d'Auvergne Cigarettes to show for his evening's work, and that chemist had
declared it was the first he had sold for weeks.

Thrush ordered his man upstairs, and took his late guest's hand as soon as
ever he dared.

"You need a good night's rest, my dear sir, and it's no use climbing to my
masthead for nothing. Mullins and I will do best if you don't mind
leaving us to ourselves for the night; but first thing to-morrow morning I
shall be at your service again, and I hope there will be some progress to
report."

Mullins was waiting for him with all the lights on, his solemn face still
more strikingly illuminated.

"Look at this, sir, look at this! These are the d'Auvergne Cigarettes!"

"So I perceive."

"This stump is the stump of a d'Auvergne Cigarette."

"I hope you enjoyed it, Mullins."

"I didn't smoke it, sir!"

"Who did?"

"That's for you to say, sir; but it's one of the little things I collected
near the scene of the murder, but took for a common cheroot, yesterday
morning in Hyde Park."

"Near the actual place?"

Thrush had pounced upon the stump, and was holding it under the strongest
of the electric lamps.

"Under a seat, sir, not above a hundred yards away!"

SECOND THOUGHTS

Pocket had been dreaming again. What else could he expect? Waking, he
felt that he had got off cheaply; that he might have been through the
nightmare of battle, as described by one who had, and depicted in the
engravings downstairs, instead of on a mercifully hazy visit to the
Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. The trouble was that he had seen
the one and not the other, and what he had seen continued to haunt him as
he lay awake, but quite horribly when he fell back into a doze. There was
nothing nebulous about the vile place then; it was as light and bright as
the room in which he lay. The sinister figures in the panelled pens were
swathed in white, as he had somewhere read that they always were at
nights. Their evil faces were shrouded out of sight. But that only made
their defiant, portly figures the more humanly inhuman and terrifying; it
was as though they had all risen, in their winding-sheets, from their
murderer's graves. Better by far their beastly faces, that you knew were
wax!