Dark Angel

“HORNS OF A LITTLE blue devil!” Jules de Grandin bent his head against the sleet-laden February wind and clutched madly at my elbow as his feet all but slipped from under him. “‘We are three fools, my friends. We should be home beside our cheerful fire instead of risking our necks going to this sacré dinner on such a night.”

“Comment ça va, mon Jules,” demanded Inspector Renouard, “where is your patriotism? Tonight’s dinner is in honor of the great General Washington, whose birthday it is. Did not our own so illustrious Marquis de Lafayette—”

“Monsieur le Marquis is dead, and we are like to be the same before we find our way home again,” de Grandin cut in irritably. “As for the great Washington, I think no more of him for choosing this so villainous month in which to be born. Now me, I selected May for my début; had he but used a like discretion—”

“Misère de Dieu, see him come! He is a crazy fool, that one!” Renouard broke in, pointing to a motor car racing toward us down the avenue.

We watched the vehicle in open-mouthed astonishment. To drive at all on such a night was risking life and limb, yet this man drove as though contending for a record on the racing track. Almost abreast of us, he applied his brakes and swerved sharply to the left, seeking to enter the cross street. The inevitable happened. With a rending of wood and metal the car skidded end for end and brought up against the curb, its right rear wheel completely dished, its motor racing wildly as the rimless spokes spun round and round.

“Mordieu, you are suicidal, my friend!” de Grandin cried, making his way toward the disabled vehicle with difficulty. “Can I assist you? I am a physician, and—”

A woman’s hysterical scream cut through his offer. “Help—save me—they’re—” Her cry died suddenly as a hand was clapped over her mouth, and a hulking brute of a man in chauffeur’s leather coat and vizored cap scrambled from the driver’s cab and faced the Frenchman truculently. “Yékhat! Be off!” he ordered shortly. “We need no help, and—”

“Don’t parley with him, Dimitri!” a heavy voice inside the tonneau commanded. “Break his damned neck and—”

“’Cré nom! With whose assistance will you break my neck, cochon?” de Grandin asked sharply. “Name of a gun, make but one step toward me, and—”

The giant chauffeur needed no further invitation. As de Grandin spoke he hurled himself forward, his big hands outstretched to grasp the little Frenchman’s throat. Like a bouncing ball de Grandin rose from the ground, intent on meeting the bully’s rush with a kick to the pit of the stomach, for he was an expert at the French art of foot-boxing, but the slippery pavement betrayed him. Both feet flew upward and he sprawled upon his back, helpless before the larger man’s attack.

Practical policeman that he was, Renouard lost no time in answering de Grandin’s cry. Reversing the heavy walking-stick which swung from his arm he brought its lead-loaded crook down upon the chauffeur’s head with sickening force, then bent to extricate his friend from the other’s crushing bulk.

“The car, into the moteur, my friend!” de Grandin cried. “A woman is in there; injured, perhaps; perhaps—”

Together they dived through the open door of the limousine’s tonneau, and a moment later there came the sound of scuffling and mingled grunts and curses as they fought desperately with some invisible antagonist.

I rushed to help them, slipped upon the sleet-glazed sidewalk, and sprawled full length as a dark body hurtled from the car, cannoned into me and paused a moment to hurl a missile, then sped away into the shadows with a mocking laugh.

“Quick, Friend Trowbridge, assist me; Renouard is hit!” de Grandin emerged from the wrecked car supporting the Inspector on his arm.

“Zut! It is nothing—a scratch!” Renouard returned. “Do you attend to her, my friend. Me, I can walk with ease. Observe—” he took a step and collapsed limply in my arms, blood streaming from a deeply incised wound in his left shoulder.

Together de Grandin and I staunched the hemorrhage as best we could, then rummaged in the ruined car for the woman whose screams we had heard when the accident occurred.

“She is unconscious but otherwise unhurt, I think,” de Grandin told me. “Do you see to Georges; I will carry her—prie-Dieu I do not slip and kill us both!”

“But what about this fellow?” I asked, motioning toward the unconscious chauffeur. “We oughtn’t leave him here. He may freeze or contract pneumonia—”

“Eh bien, one can but hope,” de Grandin interrupted. “Let him lie, my friend. The sleet may cool his ardor—he who was so intent on breaking Jules de Grandin’s neck. Come, it is but a short distance to the house. Let us be upon our way; allez-vous-en!”

A RUGGED CONSTITUTION AND THE almost infinite capacity for bearing injury which he had developed during years of service with the gendarmerie stood Inspector Renouard in good stead. Before we had reached the house he was able to walk with my assistance; by the time he had had a proper pack and bandage applied to his wound and absorbed the better part of a pint of brandy he was almost his usual debonair self.

Not so our other patient. Despite our treatment with cold compresses, sal volatilis and aromatic ammonia it was nearly half an hour before we could break the profound swoon in which she lay, and even then she was so weak and shaken we forbore to question her.

At length, when a slight tinge of color began to show in her pale cheeks de Grandin took his station before her and bowed as formally as though upon a ballroom floor. “Mademoiselle,” he began, “some half an hour since we had the happy privilege of assisting you from a motor wreck. This is Doctor Samuel Trowbridge, in whose office you are; I am Doctor Jules de Grandin, and this is our very good friend, Inspector Georges Jean Jacques Joseph-Marie Renouard, of the Sûreté Générale, all of us entirely at your service. If Mademoiselle will be so kind as to tell us how we may communicate with her friends or family we shall esteem it an honor—”

“Donald!” the young woman interrupted breathlessly. “Call Donald and tell him I’m all right!”

“Avec plaisir,” he agreed with another bow. “And this Monsieur Donald, he is who, if you please?”

“Donald Tanis. Call him at the Hotel Avalon and tell him that I—that Sonia is all right, and where I am, please. Oh, he’ll be terribly worried!”

“You have been through a most unpleasant experience. Perhaps you will be kind enough to permit that we offer you refreshment—some sherry and biscuit—while Monsieur your husband comes to fetch you? He is even now upon his way.”

“Thank you so much,” she nodded with a wan little smile, and I hastened to the pantry in search of wine and biscuit.

Seated in an easy-chair before the study fire, the girl sipped a glass of Duff Gordon and munched a pilot biscuit while de Grandin, Renouard and I studied her covertly. She was quite young—not more than thirty, I judged—and lithe and slender in stature, though by no means thin, and her hands were the whitest I had ever seen. Ash-blond her complexion was, her skin extremely fair and her hair that peculiar shade of lightness which, without being gray, is nearer silver than gold. Her eyes were bluish gray, sad, knowing and weary, as though they had seen the sorrow and futility of life from the moment of their first opening.

“You will smoke, perhaps?” de Grandin asked as she finished her biscuit. As he extended his silver pocket lighter to her cigarette the bell shrilled imperatively and I hastened to the front door to admit a tall, dark young man whose agitated manner labeled him our patient’s husband even before he introduced himself.

“My dear!” he cried, rushing across the study and taking the girl’s hand in his, then raising it to his lips while de Grandin and Renouard beamed approvingly.

“Where—how—” he faltered in his question, but his worshipful glance was eloquent.

“Donald,” the girl broke in, and though the study was almost uncomfortably warm she shuddered with a sudden chill, “it was Konstantin!”

“Wha—what?” he stammered in incredulous, horrified amazement. “My dear, you surely can’t be serious. Why, he’s dead!”

“No, dear,” she answered wearily, “I’m not jesting. It was Konstantin. There’s no mistaking it. He tried to kidnap me.

“Just as I entered the hotel dining-room a waiter told me that a gentleman wanted to see me in the lobby; so, as I knew you had to finish dressing, I went out to him. A big, bearded man in a chauffeur’s leather uniform was waiting by the door. He told me he was from the Cadillac agency; said you had ordered a new car as a surprise for my birthday, but that you wanted me to approve it before they made delivery. It was waiting outside, he said, and he would be glad if I’d just step out and look at it.

“His accent should have warned me, for I recognized him as a Russian, but there are so many different sorts of people in this country, and I was so surprised and delighted with the gift that I never thought of being suspicious. So I went out with him to a gorgeous new limousine parked about fifty feet from the porte-cochère. The engine was running, but I didn’t notice that till later.

“I walked round the car, admiring it from the outside; then he asked if I’d care to inspect the inside of the tonneau. There seemed to be some trouble with the dome light when he opened the door for me, and I was half-way in before I realized some one was inside. Then it was too late. The chauffeur shoved me in and slammed the door, then jumped into the cab and set the machine going in high gear. I never had a chance to call for help.

“It wasn’t till we’d gone some distance that my companion spoke, and when he did I almost died of fright. There was no light, and he was so muffled in furs that I could not have recognized his face anyway, but his voice—and those corpse-hands of his—I knew them! It was Konstantin.

“‘Jawohl, meine liebe Frau,’ he said—he always loved to speak German to torment me—‘it seems we meet again, nicht wahr?’

“I tried to answer him, to say something—anything—but my lips and tongue seemed absolutely paralyzed with terror. Even though I could not see, I could feel him chuckling in that awful, silent way of his.

“Just then the driver tried to take a curve at high speed and we skidded into the curb. These gentlemen were passing and I screamed to them for help. Konstantin put his hand over my mouth, and at the touch of his cold flesh against my lips I fainted. The next I knew I was here and Doctor de Grandin was offering to call you, so—” She paused and drew her husband’s hand down against her cheek. “I’m frightened, Donald—terribly frightened,” she whimpered. “Konstantin—”

Jules de Grandin could stand the strain no longer. During Mrs. Tanis’ recital I could fairly see his ungovernable curiosity bubbling up within him; now he was at the end of his endurance.

“Pardonnez-moi, Madame,” he broke in, “but may one inquire who this so offensive Konstantin is?”

“But, Madame, how can it be?” Renouard broke in. “Monsieur Tanis, he is your husband, he admits it, so do you; yet this Konstantin, he is also your husband. Non, my comprehension is unequal to it.”

“But Konstantin is dead, I tell you,” her husband insisted. “I saw him die—I saw him in his coffin—”

“Oh, my darling,” she sobbed, her lips blue with unholy terror, “you saw me dead—coffined and buried, too—but I’m living. Somehow, in some way we don’t understand—”

“Comment?” Inspector Renouard took his temples in his hands as though suffering a violent headache. “Jules, my friend, tell me I can not understand the English,” he implored. “You are a physician; examine me and tell me my faculties are failing, my ears betraying me! I hear them say, I think, that Madame Tanis has died and been buried in a grave and coffin; yet there she sits and—”

“Silence, mon singe, your jabbering annoys one!” de Grandin cut him short. To Tanis he continued:

“We should be grateful for an explanation, if you care to offer one, for Madame’s so strange statement has greatly puzzled us. It is perhaps she makes the pleasantry at our expense, or—”

“It’s no jest, I assure you, sir,” the girl broke in. “I was dead. My death and burial are recorded in the official archives of the city of Paris, and a headboard, marks my grave in Saint Sébastien, but Donald came for me and married—”

“Eh bien, Madame, either my hearing falters or my intellect is dull,” de Grandin exclaimed. “Will you repeat your statement once again, slowly and distinctly, if you please? Perhaps I did not fully apprehend you.”

DESPITE HERSELF THE GIRL smiled. “What I said is literally true,” she assured him. A pause, then: “We hate to talk of it, for the memory horrifies us both, but you gentlemen have been so kind I think we owe you an explanation.

“My name was Sonia Malakoff. I was born in Petrograd, and my father was a colonel of infantry in the Imperial Army, but some difficulty with a superior officer over the discipline of the men led to his retirement. I never understood exactly what the trouble was, but it must have been serious, for he averted court-martial and disgrace only by resigning his commission and promising to leave Russia forever.

“We went to England, for Father had friends there. We had sufficient property to keep us comfortable, and I was brought up as an English girl of the better class.

“When the War broke out Father offered his sword to Russia, but his services were peremptorily refused, and though he was bitterly hurt by the rebuff, he determined to do something for the Allied cause, and so we moved to France and he secured a noncombatant commission in the French Army. I went out as a V.A.D. with the British.

“One night in ’16 as our convoy was going back from the advanced area an air attack came and several of our ambulances were blown off the road. I detoured into a field and put on all the speed I could. As I went bumping over the rough ground I heard some one groaning in the darkness. I stopped and got down to investigate and found a group of Canadians who had been laid out by a bomb. All but two were dead and one of the survivors had a leg blown nearly off, but I managed to get them into my van with my other blessés and crowded on all the gas I could for the dressing-station.

“Next day they told me one of the men—the poor chap with the mangled leg—had died, but the other, though badly shell-shocked, had a good chance of recovery. They were very nice about it all, gave me a mention for bringing them in, and all that sort of thing. Captain Donald Tanis, the shell-shocked man, was an American serving with the Canadians. I went to see him, and he thanked me for giving him the lift. Afterward they sent him to a recuperation station on the Riviera, and we corresponded regularly, or as regularly as people can in such circumstances, until—” she paused a moment, and a slight flush tinged her pallid face.

“Bien oui,” de Grandin agreed with a delighted grin. “It was love by correspondence, n’est-ce-pas, Madame? And so you were married? Yes?”

“Not then,” she answered. “Donald’s letters became less frequent, and—and of course I did what any girl would have done in the circumstances, made mine shorter, cooler and farther apart. Finally our correspondence dwindled away entirely.

“The second revolution had taken place in Russia and her new masters had betrayed the Allies at Brest-Litovsk. But America had come into the war and things began to look bright for us, despite the Bolsheviks’ perfidy. Father should have been delighted at the turn events were taking, but apparently he was disappointed. When the Allies made their July drive in ’18 and the Germans began retreating he seemed terribly disturbed about something, became irritable or moody and distrait, often going days without speaking a word that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

“We’d picked up quite a few friends among the émigrés in Paris, and Father’s most intimate companion was Alexis Konstantin, who soon became a regular visitor at our house. I always hated him. There was something dreadfully repulsive about his appearance and manner—his dead-white face, his flabby, fish-cold hands, the very way he dressed in black and walked about so silently—he was like a living dead man. I had a feeling of almost physical nausea whenever he came near me, and once when he laid his hand upon my arm I started and screamed as though a reptile had been put against my flesh.

“When Donald’s letters finally ceased altogether, though I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself, my heart was breaking. I loved him, you see,” she added simply.

“Then one day Father came home from the War Department in a perfect fever of nervousness. ‘Sonia,’ he told me, ‘I have just been examined by the military doctors. They tell me the end may come at any time, like a thief in the night. I want you to he provided for in case it comes soon, my dear. I want you to be married.’

“‘But Father, I don’t want to marry,’ I replied. ‘The war’s not over yet, though we are winning, and I’ve still my work to do with the ambulance section. Besides, we’re well enough off to live; there’s no question of my having to marry for a home; so—’

“‘But that’s just it,’ he answered. ‘There is. That is exactly the question, my child. I—I’ve speculated; speculated and lost. Every kopeck we had has gone. I’ve nothing but my military pay, and when that stops, as it must stop directly the war is won, we’re paupers.’

“I was surprised, but far from terrified. ‘All right,’ I told him, ‘I’m strong and healthy and well educated, I can earn a living for us both.’

“‘At what?’ he asked sarcastically. ‘Typing at seventy shillings a week? As nursery governess at five pounds per month with food and lodging? No, my dear, there’s nothing for it but a rich marriage, or at least a marriage with a man able to support us both while I’m alive and keep you comfortably after that.’

“I thought I saw a ray of hope. ‘We don’t know any such man,’ I objected. ‘No Frenchman with sufficient fortune to do what you wish will marry a dowerless girl, and our Russian friends are all as poor as we, so—’

“‘Ah, but there is such a man,’ he smiled. ‘I have just the man, and he is willing—no, anxious—to make you his wife.’

“My blood seemed to go cold in my arteries as he spoke, for something inside me whispered the name of this benefactor even before Father pronounced it: Gaspardin Alexis Konstantin!

“I wouldn’t hear of it at first; I’d sooner wear my fingers out as seamstress, scrub tiles upon my knees or walk the pavements as a fille de joie than marry Konstantin, I told him. But though I was English bred I was Russian born, and Russian women are born to be subservient to men. Though I rebelled against it with every atom of my being, I finally agreed, and so it was arranged that we should marry.

“Father hurried me desperately. At the time I thought it was because he didn’t want me to have time to change my mind, but—

“It was a queer wedding day; not at all the kind I’d dreamed of. Konstantin was wealthy, Father said, but there was no evidence of wealth at the wedding. We drove to and from the church in an ancient horse-drawn taximeter cab and my father was my only attendant. An aged papa with one very dirty little boy as acolyte performed the ceremony. We had only the cheap silver-gilt crowns owned by the church—none of our own—and not so much as a single spray of flowers for my bridal bouquet.”

“The three of us came home together and Konstantin sent the concierge out for liquor. Our wedding breakfast consisted of brandy, raw fish and tea! Both Father and my husband drank more than they ate. I did neither. The very sight of Konstantin was enough to drive all desire of food away, even though the table had been spread with the choicest dainties to be had from a fashionable caterer.

“Before long, both men were more than half tipsy and began talking together in low, drunken mutterings, ignoring me completely. At last my husband bade me leave the room, ordering me out without so much as looking in my direction.

“I sat in my bedroom in a sort of chilled apathy. I imagine a condemned prisoner who knows all hope of reprieve is passed waits for the coming of the hangman as I waited there.

“My half-consciousness was suddenly broken by Father’s voice. ‘Sonia, Sonia!’ he called, and from his tone I knew he was beside himself with some emotion.

“When I went into the dining-room my father was trembling and wringing his hands in a perfect agony of terror, and tears were streaming down his cheeks as he looked imploringly at Konstantin. ‘Sonia, my daughter,’ he whispered, ‘plead with him. Go on your knees to him, my child, and beg him—pray him as you would pray God, to—’

“‘Shut up, you old fool,’ my husband interrupted. ‘Shut up and get out—leave me alone with my bride.’ He leered drunkenly at me.

“Trembling as though with palsy, my father rose humbly to obey the insolent command, but Konstantin called after him as he went out: ‘Best take your pistolet, mon vieux. You’ll probably prefer it to le peloton d’exécution.’

“I heard Father rummaging through his chest in the bedroom and turned on Konstantin. ‘What does this mean?’ I asked. ‘Why did you say he might prefer his own pistol to the firing-party?’

“‘Ask him,’ he answered with a laugh, but when I attempted to join my father he thrust me into a chair and held me there. ‘Stay where you are,’ he ordered. ‘I am your master, now.’

“Then my British upbringing asserted itself. ‘You’re not my master; no one is!’ I answered hotly. ‘I’m a free woman, not a chattel, and—’

“I never finished. Before I could complete my declaration he’d struck me with his fist and knocked me to the floor, and when I tried to rise he knocked me down again. He even kicked me as I lay there.

“I tried to fight him off, but though he was so slightly built he proved strong as a prize-fighter, and my efforts at defense were futile. They seemed only to arouse him to further fury, and he struck and kicked me again and again. I screamed to my father for help, but if he heard me he made no answer, and so my punishment went on till I lost consciousness.

“My bridal night was an inferno. Sottish with vodka and drunk with passion, Konstantin was a sadistic beast. He tore—actually ripped—my clothing off; covered me with slobbering, drunken caresses from lips to feet, alternating maudlin, obscene compliments with scurrilous insults and abuse, embracing and beating me by turns. Twice I sickened under the ordeal and both times he sat calmly by, drinking raw vodka from the bottle and waiting till my nausea passed, then resumed my torment with all the joy a mediæval Dominican might have found in torturing a helpless heretic.

“It was nearly noon next day when I woke from what was more a stupor of horror and exhaustion than sleep. Konstantin was nowhere to be seen, for which I thanked God as I staggered from the bed and sought a nightrobe to cover the shameless nudity he had imposed on me.

“‘I’ll not stand it,’ I told myself as, my self-respect somewhat restored by the garment I’d slipped on, I prepared a bath to wash the wounds and bruises I’d sustained during the night.

“Then all my new-found courage evaporated as I heard my husband’s step outside, and I cringed like any odalisk before her master as he entered—groveled on the floor like a dog which fears the whip.

“He laughed and tossed me a copy of the Paris edition of The Daily Mail. ‘You may be interested in that obituary,’ he told me, ‘the last paragraph in the fourth column.’

“I read it, and all but fainted as I read, for it told how my father had been found that morning in an obscure street on the left bank. A bullet wound in the head pointed to suicide, but no trace of the weapon had been found, for thieves had taken everything of value and stripped the body almost naked before the gendarmes found it.

“They gave him a military funeral and buried him in a soldier’s grave. His service saved him from the Potter’s Field, but the army escort and I were his only mourners. Konstantin refused to attend the services and forbade my going till I had abased myself and knelt before him, humbly begging for permission to attend my father’s funeral and promising by everything I held sacred that I would be subservient to him in every act and word and thought forever afterward if only he would grant that one poor favor.

“That evening he was drunk again, and most ill-natured. He beat me several times, but offered no endearments, and I was glad of it, for his blows, painful as they were, were far more welcome than his kisses.

“Next morning he abruptly ordered me to rejoin my unit and write him every day, making careful note of the regiments and arms of service to which the wounded men I handled belonged, and reporting to him in detail.

“I served two weeks with my unit, then the Commandant sent for me and told me they were reducing the personnel, and as I was a married woman they deemed it best that I resign at once. ‘And by the bye, Konstantin,’ she added as I saluted and turned to go, ‘you might like to take these with you—as a little souvenir, you know.’ She drew a packet from her drawer and handed it to me. It was a sheaf of fourteen letters, every one I’d written to my husband. When I opened them outside I saw that every item of intelligence they contained had been carefully blocked out with censor’s ink.

“Konstantin was furious. He thrashed me till I thought I’d not have a whole bone left.

“I took it as long as I could; then, bleeding from nose and lips, I tried to crawl from the room.

“The sight of my helplessness and utter defeat seemed to infuriate him still further. With an animal-snarl he fairly leaped on me and bore me down beneath a storm of blows and kicks.

“I felt the first few blows terribly; then they seemed to soften, as if his hands and feet were encased in thick, soft boxing-gloves. Then I sank face-downward on the floor and seemed to go to sleep.

“WHEN I AWOKE—IF YOU can call it that—I was lying on the bed, and everything seemed quiet as the grave and calm as Paradise. There was no sensation of pain or any feeling of discomfort, and it seemed to me as if my body had grown curiously lighter. The room was in semi-darkness, and I noticed with an odd feeling of detachment that I could see out of only one eye, my left. ‘He must have closed the right one with a blow,’ I told myself, but, queerly, I didn’t feel resentful. Indeed, I scarcely felt at all. I was in a sort of semi-stupor, indifferent to myself and everything else.

“A scuffle of heavily booted feet sounded outside; then the door was pushed open and a beam of light came into the room, but did not reach to me. I could tell several men had entered, and from their heavy breathing and the scraping sounds I heard, I knew they were lugging some piece of heavy furniture.

“‘No,’ some one replied, and I recognized the voice of Madame Lespard, an aged widow who occupied the flat above. ‘You must wait, gentlemen, the law—’

“‘À bas the law!’ the man replied. ‘Me, I have worked since five this morning, and I wish to go to bed.’

“‘But gentlemen, for the love of heaven, restrain yourselves!’ Madame Lespard pleaded. ‘La pauvre belle créature may not be—’

“‘No fear,’ the fellow interrupted. ‘I can recognize them at a mile. Look here.’ From somewhere he procured a lamp and brought it to the bed on which I lay. ‘Observe the pupils of the eyes,’ he ordered, ‘see how they are fixed and motionless, even when I hold the light to them.’ He brought the lamp within six inches of my face, flashing its rays directly into my eye; yet, though I felt its luminance, there was no sensation of being dazzled.

“Then suddenly the light went out. At first I thought he had extinguished the lamp, but in a moment I realized what had actually happened was that my eyelid had been lowered. Though I had not felt his finger on the lid, he had drawn it down across my eye as one might draw a curtain!

“‘And now observe again,” I heard him say, and the scratch of a match against a boot-sole was followed by the faint, unpleasant smell of searing flesh.

“Forbear, Monsieur!” old Madame Lespard cried in horror. “Oh, you are callous—inhuman—you gentlemen of the pompes funèbres!”

“Then horrifying realization came to me. A vague, fantasmal thought which had been wafting in my brain, like an unremembered echo of a long-forgotten verse, suddenly crystallized in my mind. These men were from the pompes funèbres—the municipal undertakers of Paris—the heavy object they had lugged in was a coffin—my coffin! They thought me dead!

“I tried to rise, to tell them that I lived, to scream and beg them not to put me in that dreadful box. In vain. Although I struggled till it seemed my lungs and veins must burst with effort, I could not make a sound, could not stir a hand or finger, could not so much as raise the eyelid the undertaker’s man had lowered!

“‘Ah, bon soir, Monsieur le Médicin!’ I heard the leader of the crew exclaim. ‘We feared you might not come tonight, and the poor lady would have to lie un-coffined till tomorrow.’

“The fussy little municipal doctor bustled up to the bed on which I lay, flashed a lamp into my face and mumbled something about being overworked with la grippe killing so many people every day. Then he turned away and I heard the rustle of papers as he filled in the blanks of my certificate of death. If I could have controlled any member of my body I would have wept. As it was, I merely lay there, unable to shed a single tear for the poor unfortunate who was being hustled, living, to the grave.

“Konstantin’s voice mingled with the others’. I heard him tell the doctor how I had fallen head-first down the stairs, how he had rushed wildly after me and borne me up to bed, only to find my neck was broken. The lying wretch actually sobbed as he told his perjured story, and the little doctor made perfunctory, clucking sounds of sympathy as he listened in attentively and wrote the death certificate—the warrant which condemned me to awful death by suffocation in the grave!

“I felt myself lifted from the bed and placed in the pine coffin, heard them lay the lid above me and felt the jar as they drove home nail after nail. At last the task was finished, the entrepreneurs accepted a drink of brandy and went away, leaving me alone with my murderer.

“I heard him take a turn across the room, heard the almost noiseless chuckle which he gave whenever he was greatly pleased, heard him scratch a match to light a cigarette; then, of a sudden, he checked his restless walk and turned toward the door with a short exclamation.

“‘Who comes?’ he called as a measured tramping sounded in the passageway outside.

“‘The military police!’ his hail was answered. ‘Alexis Konstantin, we make you arrested for espionage. Come!’

“He snarled like a trapped beast. There was the click of a pistol-hammer, but the gendarmes were too quick for him. Like hounds upon the boar they leaped on him, and though he fought with savage fury—I had good cause to know how strong he was!—they overwhelmed him, beat him into submission with fists and saber-hilts and snapped steel bracelets on his wrists.

“All fight gone from him, cursing, whining, begging for mercy—to be allowed to spend the last night beside the body of his poor, dead wife!—they dragged him from the room and down the stairs. I never saw him again—until tonight!”

The girl smiled sadly, a trace of bitterness on her lips. “Have you ever lain awake at night in a perfectly dark room and tried to keep count of time?” she asked. “If you have, you know how long a minute can seem. Imagine how many centuries I lived through while I lay inside that coffin, sightless, motionless, soundless, but with my sense of hearing abnormally sharpened. For longer years than the vilest sinner must spend in purgatory I lay there thinking—thinking. The rattle of carts in the streets and a slight increase in temperature told me day had come, but the morning brought no hope to me. It meant only that I was that much nearer the Golgotha of my Via Dolorosa.

“At last they came. ‘Where to?’ a workman asked as rough hands took up my coffin and bore me down the stairs.

“‘Saint Sébastien,’ the premier ouvrier returned, ‘her husband made arrangements yesterday. They say he was rich. Eh bien; it is likely so; only the wealthy and the poor dare have funerals of the third class.’

“Over the cobbles of the streets the little, one-horse hearse jolted to the church, and at every revolution of the wheels my panic grew. ‘Surely, surely I shall gain my self-control again,’ I told myself. ‘It can’t be that I’ll lie like this until—’ I dared not finish out the sentence, even in my thoughts.

“The night before, the waiting had seemed endless. Now it seemed the shambling, half-starved nag which drew the hearse was winged like Pegasus and made the journey to the cemetery more swiftly than the fastest airplane.

“At last we halted, and they dragged me to the ground, rushed me at breakneck speed across the cemetery and put me down a moment while they did something to the coffin. What was it? Were they making ready to remove the lid? Had the municipal doctor remembered tardily how perfunctory his examination had been, and conscience-smitten, rushed to the cemetery to snatch me from the very jaws of the grave?

“‘We therefore commit her body to the earth—earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust—’ the priest’s low sing-song came to me, muffled by the coffin-walls. Too late I realized the sound I heard had been only the knotted end of the lowering-rope falling on the coffin top as the workmen drew a loop about the case.

“The priest’s chant became fainter and fainter. I felt myself sinking as though upon a slowly descending lift, while the ropes sawed and rasped against the square edges of the coffin, making noises like the bellow of a cracked bass viol, and the coffin teetered crazily from side to side and scraped against the raw edges of the grave. At last I came to rest. A jolt, a little thud, a final scraping noise, and the lowering-ropes were jerked free and drawn underneath the coffin and out of the grave. The end had come, there was no more—

“A terrible report, louder than the bursting of a shell, exploded just above my chest, and the close, confined air inside the coffin shook and trembled like the air in a dugout when hostile flyers lay down an air-barrage. A second shock burst above my face—its impact was so great I knew the coffin lid must surely crack beneath it—then a perfect drum-fire of explosions as clod on roaring clod struck down upon the thin pine which coffined me. My ears were paralyzed with the continuous detonations, I could feel the constantly increasing weight of earth pressing on my chest, my mouth, my nostrils. I made one final effort to rouse myself and scream for help; then a great flare, like the bursting of a star-shell, enveloped me and the last shred of sensation went amid a blaze of flame and roar of thunder.

“SLOWLY I FOUGHT BACK to consciousness. I shuddered as the memory of my awful dream came back to me. I’d dreamed that I was dead—or, rather, in a trance—that men from the pompes funèbres came and thrust me into a coffin and buried me in Saint Sébastien, and I had heard the clods fall on the coffin lid above me while I lay powerless to raise a hand.

“How good it was to lie there in my bed and realize that it had only been a dream! There, with the soft, warm mattress under me, I could lie comfortably and rest till time had somewhat softened the terror of that nightmare; then I would rise and make a cup of tea to soothe my frightened nerves; then go again to bed and peaceful sleep.

“But how dark it was! Never, even in those days of air-raids, when all lights were forbidden, had I seen a darkness so absolute, so unrelieved by any faintest ray of light. I moved my arms restlessly. To right and left were hard, rough wooden walls that pressed my sides and interfered with movement. I tried to rise, but fell back with a cry of pain, for I had struck my brow a violent blow. The air about me was very close and damp; heavy, as though confined under pressure.

“Suddenly I knew. Horror made my scalp sting and prickle and the awful truth ran through me like an icy wave. It was no dream, but dreadful fact. I had emerged from the coma which held me while preparations for my funeral were made; at last I was awake, mistress of my body, conscious and able to move and scream aloud for help—but none would ever hear me. I was coffined, shut up beneath a mound of earth in Saint Sébastien Cemetery—buried alive!

“I called aloud in agony of soul and body. The dreadful reverberation of my voice in that sealed coffin rang back against my ears like thunder-claps tossed back by mountain peaks.

“Then I went mad. Shrieking, cursing the day I was born and the God Who let this awful fate befall me, I writhed and twisted, kicked and struggled in the coffin. The sides pressed in so closely that I could not raise my hands to my head, else I had torn my hair out by the roots and scratched my face to the bone, but I dug my nails into my thighs through the flimsy drapery of my shroud and bit my lips and tongue until my mouth was choked with blood and my raving cries were muted like the gurglings of a drowning man. Again and yet again I struck my brow against the thin pine wood, getting a fierce joy from the pain. I drew up my knees as far as they could go and arched my body in a bow, determined to burst the sepulcher which held me or spend my faint remaining spark of life in one last effort at escape. My forehead crashed against the coffin lid, a wave of nausea swept over me and, faint and sick, I fell back to a merciful unconsciousness.

“The soft, warm sunlight of September streamed through an open window and lay upon the bed on which I lay, and from the table at my side a bowl of yellow roses sent forth a cloud of perfume. ‘I’m surely dead,’ I told myself. ‘I’m released from the grave at last. I’ve died and gone—where? Where was I? If this were heaven or paradise, or even purgatory, it looked suspiciously like earth; yet how could I be living, and if I were truly dead, what business had I still on earth?

“Listlessly I turned my head. There, in American uniform, a captain’s bars gleaming on his shoulders, stood Donald, my Donald, whom I’d thought lost to me forever. ‘My dear,’ I whispered, but got no farther, for in a moment his arms were round me and his lips were pressed to mine.”

Sonia paused a moment, a smile of tenderest memory on her lips, the light that never was on sea or land within her eyes. “I didn’t understand at all,” she told us, “and even now I only know it second-hand. Perhaps Donald will tell you his part of the story. He knows the details better than I.”

THE LEAPING FLAMES BEHIND the andirons cast pretty highlights of red and orange on Donald Tanis and his wife as they sat hand in hand in the love seat beside the hearth rug. “I suppose you gentlemen think I was pretty precipitous in love-making, judging from the record Sonia’s given,” the young husband began with a boyish grin, “but you hadn’t watched beside her bed while she hovered between sanity and madness as I had, and hadn’t heard her call on me and say she loved me. Besides, when she looked at me that afternoon and said, ‘My dear!’ I knew she loved me just as well as though she’d taken all day long to tell me.”

De Grandin and Renouard nodded joint and most emphatic approval. “And so you were married?” de Grandin asked.

“You bet we were,” Donald answered. “There’d have been all sorts of red tape to cut if we’d been married as civilians, but I was in the army and Sonia wasn’t a French citizeness; so we went to a friend of mine who was a padre in one of our outfits and had him tie the knot. But I’m telling this like a newspaper story, giving the ending first. To begin at the start:

“The sawbones in the hospital told me I was a medical freak, for the effect of the bursting ‘coalbox’ on me was more like the bends, or caisson disease, than the usual case of shell-shock. I didn’t go dotty, nor get the horrors; I wasn’t even deafened to any extent, but I did have the most God-awful neuralgic pains with a feeling of almost overwhelming giddiness whenever I tried to stand. I seemed as tall as the Woolworth tower the minute I got on my feet, and seven times out of ten I’d go sprawling on my face two seconds after I got out of bed. They packed me off to a convalescent home at Biarritz and told me to forget I’d ever been mixed up in any such thing as a war.

“I did my best to follow orders, but one phase of the war just wouldn’t be forgotten. That was the plucky girl who’d dragged me in that night the Fritzies tried to blow me into Kingdom Come. She’d been to see me in hospital before they sent me south, and I’d learned her name and unit, so as soon as I was up to it I wrote her. Lord, how happy I was when she answered!

“You know how those things are. Bit by bit stray phrases of intimacy crept into our notes, and we each got so that the other’s letters were the most important things in life. Then Sonia’s notes became less frequent and more formal; finally they hinted that she thought I was not interested any more. I did my best to disabuse her mind of that thought, but the letters came farther and farther apart. At last I decided I’d better tell her the whole truth, so I proposed by mail. I didn’t like the idea, but there I was, way down in the Pyrénées, unable to get about, except in a wheel-chair, and there she was somewhere on the west front. I couldn’t very well get to her to tell her of my love, and she couldn’t come to me—and I was dreadfully afraid I’d lose her.

“Then the bottom dropped out of everything. I never got an answer to that letter. I didn’t care a hang what happened to me then; just sat around and moped till the doctors began to think my brain must be affected, after all.

“I guess about the only thing that snapped me out of it was America’s coming in. With my own country sending troops across, I had a definite object in life once more; to get into American uniform and have a last go at the Jerries. So I concentrated on getting well.

“It wasn’t till the latter part of July, though, that they let me go, and then they wouldn’t certify me for duty at the front. ‘One more concussion and you’ll go blotto altogether, lad,’ the commandant told me before I left the nursing-home, and he must have put a flea in G.H.Q’s. ear, too, for they turned me down cold as caviar when I asked for combatant service.

“I’d made a fair record with the Canadians, and had a couple of good friends in the War Department, so I drew a consolation prize in the form of a captaincy of infantry with assignment to liaison duty with the Censure Militaire.

“The French officers in the bureau were first-rate scouts and we got along famously. One day one of ’em told me of a queer case they’d had passed along by the British M.I. It seemed there was a queer sort of bird, a Russian by the name of Konstantin, who’d been making whoopee for some time, but covering up his tracks so skillfully they’d never been able to put salt on his tail. He’d been posing as an émigré and living in the Russian colony in Paris, always with plenty of money, but no visible employment. After the way the Bolshies had let the Allies down everything Russian was regarded with suspicion, and this bird had been a source of several sleepless nights for the French Intelligence. Finally, it seemed, they’d got deadwood on him.

“An elderly Russian who’d been billeted in the censor’s bureau and always been above suspicion had been found dead in the streets one morning, a suicide, and the police had hardly got his body to the morgue when a letter from him came to the chief. In it he confessed that he’d been systematically stealing information from censored documents and turning it over to Konstantin, who was really an agent for the Soviets working with the Heinies. Incidentally, the old fellow named several other Russians who’d been corrupted by Konstantin. It seemed his game was to lend them money when they were hard up, which they generally were, then get them to do a little innocuous spying for him in return for the loan. After that it was easy. He had only to threaten to denounce them in order to keep them in his power and make them go on gathering information for him, and of course the poor fish were more and more firmly entangled in the net with each job they did for him.

“Just why old Captain Malakoff chose to kill himself and denounce Konstantin wasn’t clear, but the Frenchman figured that his conscience had been troubling him for some time and he’d finally gotten to the point where he couldn’t live with it any longer.

“I’d been sitting back, not paying much attention to Lieutenant Fouchet’s story, but when he mentioned the suicide’s name my interest was roused. Of course, Malakoff isn’t an unusual Russian name, but this man had been an officer in the Imperial army in his younger days, and had been taken in the French service practically as an act of charity. The details seemed to fit my case. ‘I used to know a girl named Malakoff,’ I said. ‘Her father was in the censorship, too, I believe.’

“Fouchet smiled in that queer way he had, showing all his teeth at once beneath his little black mustache. I always suspected he was proud of the bridge work an American dentist had put in for him. ‘Was the young lady’s name Sonia, by any chance?’ he asked.

“‘Ah? It is doubtless the daughter of our estimable suicide, in that case,’ he replied. ‘Attend me: Two weeks ago she married with this Konstantin while she was on furlough from her unit at the front. Almost immediately after her marriage she rejoined her unit, and each day she has written her husband a letter detailing minutely the regiments and arms of service to which the wounded men she carried have belonged. These letters have, of course, been held for us by the British, and voilà, our case is complete. We are prepared to spring our trap. Captain Malakoff we buried with full military honors; no one suspects he has confessed. Tonight or tomorrow we all arrest this Konstantin and his accomplices.’ He paused and smiled unpleasantly; then: ‘It is dull work for the troops stationed here in Paris,’ he added. ‘They will appreciate a little target practice.’

“‘I think that we can let the lady go,’ he said. ‘Doubtless she was but a tool in her husband’s hands; the same influence which drove her father from his loyalty may have been exerted on her; he is a very devil with the women, this Konstantin. Besides, several of his aides have confessed, so we have ample evidence on which to send him to the firing-party without the so pitiful little spy-letters his wife wrote to him. She must be dismissed from the service, of course, and never may she serve in any capacity, either with the civil or military governments, but at least she will be spared a court-martial and public disgrace. Am I not kind, my friend?’

“A few days later he came to me with a serious face. ‘The man Konstantin has been arrested,’ he said, ‘but his wife, hélas, she is no more. The night before last she died in their apartment—fell down the stairs and broke her lovely neck, I’m told—and yesterday they buried her in Saint Sébastien. Courage, my friend!’ he added as he saw my face. ‘These incidents are most regrettable, but—there is much sorrow in the world today—c’est la guerre.’

“‘Better than my life,’ I answered. ‘It was only the thought of her that brought me through—she dragged me in and saved my life one night out by Lens when the Jerries knocked me over with an air-bomb.’

“‘Mon pauvre garçon!’ he sympathized. Then: ‘Consider me, my friend, there is a rumor—oh, a very unsubstantiated rumor, but still a rumor, that poor Madame Konstantin did not die an entirely natural death. An aged widow-neighbor of hers has related stories of a woman’s cries for mercy, as though she were most brutally beaten, coming from the Konstantin apartment. One does not know this is a fact. The old talk much, and frequently without good reason, but—’

“‘The dog!’ I interrupted. ‘The cowardly dog, if he hit Sonia I’ll—’

“Fouchet broke in. ‘I shall attend the execution tomorrow,’ he informed me. ‘Would not you like to do the same?’

“Why I said yes I’ve no idea, but something, some force outside me, seemed to urge me to accept the invitation, and so it was arranged that I should go.

“A few hooded street lamps were battling ineffectually with the foggy darkness when we arrived at the Santé Prison a little after three next morning. Several motor cars were parked in the quadrangle and a sergeant assigned us seats in one of them. After what seemed an interminable wait, we saw a little knot of people come from one of the narrow doors leading into the courtyard—several officers in blue and black uniforms, a civilian handcuffed to two gendarmes, and a priest—and enter a car toward the head of the procession. In a moment we were under way, and I caught myself comparing our motorcade to a funeral procession on its way to the cemetery.

“A pale streak of dawn was showing in the east, bringing the gabled roofs and towers out in faint silhouette as we swung into the Place de la Nation. The military chauffeurs put on speed and we were soon in the Cours de Vincennes, the historic old fortification looming gloomy and forbidding against the sky as we dashed noiselessly on to the champ d’execution, where two companies of infantry in horizon blue were drawn up facing each other, leaving a narrow lane between. At the farther end of this aisle a stake of two-by-four had been driven into the turf, and behind and a little to the left stood a two-horse black-curtained van, from the rear of which could be seen protruding the butt of a deal coffin, rough and unfinished as a hardware merchant’s packing-case. A trio of unshaven workmen in black smocks lounged beside the wagon, a fourth stood at the horses’ heads.

“As our party alighted a double squad of musicians stationed at the lower end of the files of troops tossed their trumpets upward with a triple flourish and began sounding a salute and the soldiers came to present arms. I could see the tiny drops of misty rain shining like gouts of sweat on the steel helmets and bayonet blades as we advanced between the rows of infantry. A chill of dread ran up my spine as I glanced at the soldiers facing us on each side. Their faces were grave and stern, their eyes harder than the bayonets on their rifles. Cold, implacable hatred, pitiless as death’s own self, was in every countenance. This was a spy, a secret enemy of France, who marched to his death between their perfectly aligned ranks. The wet and chilly morning air seemed surcharged with an emanation of concentrated hate and ruthlessness.

“When the prisoner was almost at the stake he suddenly drew back against the handcuffs binding him to his guard and said something over his shoulder to the colonel marching directly behind him. The officer first shook his head, then consulted with a major walking at his left, finally nodded shortly. ‘Monsieur le Capitaine,’ a dapper little sub-lieutenant saluted me, ‘the prisoner asks to speak with you. It is irregular, but the colonel has granted permission. However, you may talk with him only in the presence of a French officer’—he looked coldly at me, as though suspecting I were in some way implicated in the spy’s plots—‘you understand that, of course?’

“‘Do so, my friend,’ he urged. ‘Who knows, he may have news of Madame Sonia, your morte amoureuse. Come.

“‘I will act as witness to the conversation and stand surety for Captain Tanis,’ he added to the subaltern with frigid courtesy.

“They exchanged polite salutes and decidedly impolite glares, and Fouchet and I advanced to where the prisoner and the priest stood between the guarding gendarmes.

“Even if I had known nothing of him—if I’d merely passed him casually on the boulevard—Konstantin would have repelled me. He was taller than the average and thin with a thinness that was something more than the sign of malnutrition; this skeletal gauntness seemed to have a distinct implication of evil. His hat had been removed, but from neck to feet he was arrayed in unrelieved black, a black shirt bound round the collar with a black cravat, a black serge suit of good cut and material, shoes of dull-black leather, even gloves of black kid on his long, thin hands. He had a sardonic face, long, smooth-shaven, its complexion an unhealthy yellowish olive. His eyes were black as carbon, and as lacking in luster, overhung by arched brows of intense, dead black, like his hair, which was parted in the middle and brushed sharply back from the temples, leaving a point at the center of the forehead. This inverted triangle led down to a long, hooked nose, and that to a long, sharp chin. Between the two there ran a wide mouth with thin, cruel lips of unnatural, brilliant red, looking, against the sallow face, as though they had been freshly rouged. An evil face it was, evil with a fathomless understanding of sin and passion, and pitiless as the visage of a predatory beast.

“He smiled briefly, almost imperceptibly, as I approached. ‘Captain Donald Tanis, is it not?” he asked in a low, mocking voice.

“‘Monsieur le Capitaine,’ he proceeded, ‘I have sent for you because I, of all the people in the world, can give you a word of comfort—and my time for disinterested philanthropy grows short. A little while ago I had the honor to take to wife a young lady in whom you had been deeply interested. Indeed I think we might make bold to say you were in love with her, nicht wahr?’

“As I still returned no answer he opened that cavernous, red-lipped mouth of his and gave a low, almost soundless chuckle, repulsive as the grinning of a skull.

“‘Jawohl,’ he continued, ‘let us waive the tender confession. Whatever your sentiments were toward her, there was no doubt of hers toward you. She married me, but it was you she loved. The marriage was her father’s doing. He was in my debt, and I pressed him for my pound of flesh, only in this instance it was a hundred pounds or so of flesh—his daughter’s. He’d acted as an agent of mine at the Censure Militaire until he’d worn out his usefulness, so I threatened to denounce him unless he would arrange a marriage for me with the charming Sonia. Having gotten what I wanted, I had no further use for him. The sad-eyed old fool would have been a wet blanket on the ardor of my honeymoon. I told him to get out—gave him his choice between disposing of himself or facing a French firing-squad.

“‘It seems now that he chose to be revenged on me at the same time he gave himself the happy dispatch. Dear, dear, who would have thought the sniveling old dotard would have had the spirit?

“‘But we digress and the gentlemen grow impatient,’ he nodded toward the file of troops. ‘We Russians have a saying that the husband who fails to beat his wife is lacking in outward manifestation of affection.’ He chuckled soundlessly again. ‘I do not think my bride had cause for such complaint.

“‘What would you have given,’ he asked in a low, mocking whisper, ‘to have stood in my place that night three weeks ago? To have torn the clothing off her shuddering body, to have cooled her fevered blushes with your kisses, then melted her maidenly coolness with burning lips—to have strained her trembling form within your arms, then, in the moment of surrender, to have thrust her from you, beaten her down, hurled her to the floor and ground her underfoot till she crept suppliant to you on bare and bleeding knees, holding up her bruised and bleeding face to your blows or your caresses, as you chose to give them—utterly submissive, wholly, unconditionally yours, to do with as you wished?’

“He paused again and I could see little runnels of sweat trickling down his high, narrow brow as he shook with passion at the picture his words had evoked.

“‘Nu,’ he laughed shortly. ‘I fear my love became too violent at last. The fish in the pan has no fear of strangling in the air. I can tell you this without fear of increasing my penalty. Sonia’s death certificate declares she died of a broken neck resulting from a fall downstairs. Bah! She died because I beat her! I beat her to death, do you hear, my fish-blooded American, my chaste, chivalrous worshiper of women, and as she died beneath my blows, she called on you to come and save her!

“‘You thought she stopped her letters because she had grown tired? Bah, again. She did it out of pride, because she thought that you no longer cared. At my command her father intercepted the letters you sent to her Paris home—I read them all, even your halting, trembling proposal, which she never saw or even suspected. It was amusing, I assure you.

“‘You’ve come to see me die, hein? Then have your fill of seeing it. I saw Sonia die; heard her call for help to the lover who never came, saw her lower her pride to call out to the man she thought had jilted her as I rained blow on blow upon her!’

“Abruptly his manner changed, he was the suave and smooth-spoken gentleman once more. ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Hauptmann!’ he bid me with a mocking bow.

“‘I await your pleasure, Messieurs,’ he announced, turning to the gendarmes.

“A detail of twelve soldiers under the command of a lieutenant with a drawn sword detached itself from the nearer company of infantry, executed a left wheel and came to halt about five meters away, their rifles at the order, the bayonets removed. The colonel stepped forward and read a summary of the death sentence, and as we drew back the gendarmes unlatched their handcuffs and bound the prisoner with his back against the post with a length of new, white rope. A handkerchief was bound about his eyes and the gendarmes stepped back quickly.

“‘Adieu pour ce monde, mon Lieutenant, do not forget the coup de grâce!’ Konstantin called airily.

“The lieutenant raised his sword and swung it downward quickly; a volley rang out from the platoon of riflemen.

“The transformation in the prisoner was instant and horrible. He collapsed, his body sagging weakly at the knees, as a filled sack collapses when its contents are let out through a cut, then sprawled full length face-downward on the ground, for the bullets had cut the rope restraining him. But on the turf the body writhed and contorted like a snake seared with fire, and from the widely opened mouth there came a spate of blood and gurgling, strangling cries mingled with half-articulate curses.

“A corporal stepped forward from the firing-party, his heavy automatic in his hand. He halted momentarily before the widening pool of blood about the writhing body, then bent over, thrust the muzzle of his weapon into the long black hair which, disordered by his death agonies, was falling about Konstantin’s ears, and pulled the trigger. A dull report, like the popping of a champagne cork, sounded, and the twisting thing upon the ground gave one convulsive shudder, then lay still.

“‘This is the body of Alexis Konstantin, a spy, duly executed in pursuance of the sentence of death pronounced by the military court. Does anyone lay claim to it?’ announced the commandant in a steady voice. No answer came, though we waited what seemed like an hour to me.

“‘À vos rangs!’ Marching in quick time, the execution party filed past the prostrate body on the blood-stained turf and rejoined its company, and at a second command the two units of infantry formed columns of fours and marched from the field, the trumpet sounding at their head.

“The black-smocked men dragged the coffin from the black-curtained van, dumped the mangled body unceremoniously into it, and the driver whipped his horses into a trot toward the cemetery of Vincennes where executed spies and traitors were interred in unmarked graves.

“‘A queer one, that,’ an officer of the party which had accompanied the prisoner to execution told us as we walked toward our waiting cars. ‘When we left the Santé he was almost numb with fright, but when I told him that the coup de grâce—the mercy shot—was always given on occasions of this kind, he seemed to forget his fears and laughed and joked with us and with his warders till the very minute when we reached the field. Tiens, he seemed to have a premonition that the volley would not at once prove fatal and that he must suffer till the mercy shot was given. Do you recall how he reminded the platoon commander to remember the shot before the order to fire was given? Poor devil!’”

“Ah?” said Jules de Grandin. “A-ah? Do you report that conversation accurately, my friend?”

“Of course I do,” young Tanis answered. “It’s stamped as firmly on my mind as if it happened yesterday. One doesn’t forget such things, sir.”

“Précisément, Monsieur,” de Grandin agreed with a thoughtful nod. “I did but ask for verification. This may have some bearing on that which may develop later, though I hope not. What next, if you please?”

Young Tanis shook his head as though to clear an unhappy memory from his mind. “Just one thought kept dinning in my brain,” he continued. “‘Sonia is dead—Sonia is dead!’ a jeering voice seemed repeating endlessly in my ear. ‘She called on you for help and you failed her!’ By the time we arrived at the censor’s bureau I was half mad; by luncheon I had formed a resolve. I would visit Saint Sébastien that night and take farewell of my dead sweetheart—she whom Fouchet had called my morte amoureuse.

“The light mist of the morning had ripened into a steady, streaming downpour by dark; by half-past eleven, when my fiacre let me down at Saint Sébastien, the wind was blowing half a gale and the rain drops stung like whip-lashes as they beat into my face beneath the brim of my field hat. I turned my raincoat collar up as far as it would go and splashed and waded through the puddles to the pentice of the tiny chapel beside the cemetery entrance. A light burned feebly in the intendant’s cabin, and as the old fellow came shuffling to open the door in answer to my furious knocks, a cloud of super-heated, almost fetid air burst into my face. There must have been a one per cent concentration of carbon monoxide in the room, for every opening was tightly plugged and a charcoal brazier was going full blast.

“He blinked stupidly at me a moment; then: ‘M’sieur l’Americain?’ he asked doubtfully, looking at my soaking hat and slicker for confirmation of his guess. ‘M’sieur has no doubt lost his way, n’est-ce-pas? This is the cemetery of Saint Sébastien—’

“‘Monsieur l’Americain has not lost his way, and he is perfectly aware this is the cemetery of Saint Sébastien,’ I assured him. Without waiting for the invitation I knew he would not give, I pushed by him into the stuffy little cabin and kicked the door shut. ‘Would the estimable fossoyeur care to earn a considerable sum of money—five hundred—a thousand francs—perhaps?’ I asked.

“‘Sacré Dieu, he is crazy, this one,’ the old man muttered. ‘Mad he is, like all the Yankees, and drunk in the bargain. Help me, blessed Mother!’

“I took him by the elbow, for he was edging slowly toward the door, and shook a bundle of hundred-franc notes before his staring eyes. ‘Five of these now, five more when you have fulfilled your mission, and not a word to anyone!’ I promised.

“His little shoe-button eyes shone with speculative avarice. ‘M’sieur desires that I help him kill some one?’ he ventured. ‘Is it perhaps that M’sieur has outside the body of one whom he would have secretly interred?’

“‘Nothing as bad as that,’ I answered, laughing in spite of myself, then stated my desires baldly. ‘Will you do it, at once?’ I finished.

“‘Mille tonnerres, M’sieur, you have no heart,’ he assured me. ‘A poor man can scarcely live these days, and the risk I run is great. However,’ he added hastily as I folded the bills and prepared to thrust them back into my pocket, ‘however, one consents. There is nothing else to do.’ He slouched off to a corner of the hut and picked up a rusty spade and mattock. ‘Come, let us go,’ he growled, dropping a folded burlap sack across his shoulders.

“The rain, wind-driven between the leafless branches of the poplar trees, beat dismally down upon the age-stained marble tombs and the rough, unsodded mounds of the ten-year concessions. Huddled by the farther wall of the cemetery, beneath their rows of ghastly white wooden signboards, the five- and three-year concessions seemed to cower from the storm. These were the graves of the poorer dead, one step above the tenants of the Potter’s Field. The rich, who owned their tombs or graves in perpetuity, slept their last long sleep undisturbed; next came the rows of ten-year concessionaires, whose relatives had bought them the right to lie in moderately deep graves for a decade, after which their bones would be exhumed and deposited in a common charnel-house, all trace of their identity lost. The five-year concessionnaires’ graves were scarcely deeper than the height of the coffins they enclosed, and their repose was limited to half a decade, while the three-year concessions, placed nearest the cemetery wall, were little more than mounds of sodden earth heaped over coffins sunk scarce a foot underground, destined to be broken down and emptied in thirty-six months. The sexton led the way to one of these and began shoveling off the earth with his spade.

“His tool struck an obstruction with a thud and in a moment he was wrenching at the coffin top with the flat end of his mattock.

“I took the candle-lantern he had brought and flashed its feeble light into the coffin. Sonia lay before me, rigid as though petrified, her hands tight-clenched, the nails digging into the soft flesh of her palms, little streams of dried blood running from each self-inflicted wound. Her eyes were closed—thank heaven!—her mouth a little open, and on her lips there lay a double line of bloody froth.

“‘Grand Dieu!’ the sexton cried as he looked past me into the violated coffin. ‘Come away, quickly, M’sieur; it is a vampire that we see! Behold the life-like countenance, the opened mouth all bloody from the devil’s breakfast, the hands all wet with human blood! Come, I will strike it to the heart with my pickax and sever its unhallowed head with my spade, then we shall fill the grave again and go away all quickly. O, Sainte Vierge, have pity on us! See, M’sieur, I do begin!’ He laid the spur-end of his mattock against Sonia’s left breast, and I could see the flimsy crêpe night robe she wore by way of shroud and the soft flesh beneath dimple under the iron’s weight.

“‘Stop it, you fool!’ I bellowed, snatching his pickax and bending forward. ‘You shan’t—’ Some impulse prompted me to rearrange the shroud where the muddy mattock had soiled it, and as my hand came into contact with the beloved body I started. The flesh was warm.

“I thrust the doddering old sexton back with a tremendous shove and he landed sitting in a pool of mud and water and squatted there, mouthing bleating admonitions to me to come away.

“Sinking to my knees beside the grave I put my hand against her breast, then laid a finger on her throat beneath the angle of the jaw, as they’d taught us in first-aid class. There was no doubt of it. Faint as the fluttering of a fledgling thrust prematurely from its nest and almost perished with exposure, but still perceptible, a feeble pulse was beating in her breast and throat.

“A moment later I had snatched my raincoat off, wrapped it about her, and, flinging a handful of banknotes at the screaming sexton, I clasped her flaccid body in my arms, sloshed through the mud to the cemetery wall and vaulted over it.

“I found myself in a sort of alley flanked on both sides by stables, a pale light burning at its farther end. Toward this I made, bending almost double against the driving rain in order to shield my precious burden from the storm and to present the poorest target possible if the sexton should procure a gun and take a pot-shot at me.

“It seemed as though I waded through the rain for hours, though actually I don’t suppose I walked for more than twenty minutes before a prowling taxi hailed me. I jumped into the vehicle and told the man to drive to my quarters as fast as his old rattletrap would go, and while we skidded through the sodden streets I propped Sonia up against the cushions and wrapped my blouse about her feet while I held her hands in mine, chafing them and breathing on them.

“Once in my room I put her into bed, piled all the covers I could about her, heated water and soaked some flannel cloths in it and put the hot rolls to her feet, then mixed some cognac and water and forced several spoonfuls of it down her throat.

“I must have worked an hour, but finally my clumsy treatment began to show results. The faintest flush appeared in her cheeks, and a tinge of color came to the pale, wounded lips which I’d wiped clean of blood and bathed in water and cologne when I first put her into bed.

“As soon as I dared leave her for a moment I hustled out and roused the concierge and sent her scrambling for a doctor. It seemed a week before he came, and when he did he merely wrote me a prescription, looked importantly through his pince-nez and suggested that I have him call next morning.

“I pleaded illness at the bureau and went home from the surgeon’s office with advice to stay indoors as much as possible for the next week. I was a sort of privileged character, you see, and got away with shameless malingering which would have gotten any other fellow a good, sound roasting from the sawbones. Every moment after that which I could steal from my light duties at the bureau I spent with Sonia. Old Madame Couchin, the concierge, I drafted into service as a nurse, and she accepted the situation with the typical Frenchwoman’s aplomb.

“It was September before Sonia finally came back to full consciousness, and then she was so weak that the month was nearly gone before she could totter out with me to get a little sunshine and fresh air in the bois. We had a wonderful time shopping at the Galleries Lafayette, replacing the horrifying garments Madame Couchin had bought for us with a suitable wardrobe. Sonia took rooms at a little pension, and in October we were—

“Ha, parbleu, married at last!” Jules de Grandin exclaimed with a delighted chuckle. “Mille crapauds, my friend, I thought we never should have got you to the parson’s door!”

The girl lifted her husband’s hand and cuddled it against her cheek. “Please, Donald dear,” she pleaded, “please don’t let Konstantin take me from you again.”

“But, darling,” the young man protested, “I tell you, you must be mistaken.

“Mustn’t she, Doctor de Grandin?” he appealed. “If I saw Konstantin fall before a firing-party and saw the corporal blow his brains out, and saw them nail him in his coffin, he must be dead, mustn’t he? Tell her she can’t be right, sir!”

“My friends,” de Grandin interrupted gravely, “it may be that you both are right, though the good God forbid that it is so.”

DONALD AND SONIA TANIS regarded him with open-mouthed astonishment. “You mean it’s possible Konstantin might have escaped in some mysterious way, and actually come here?” the young man asked at last.

The little Frenchman made no answer, but the grave regard he bent on them seemed more ominous than any vocally expressed opinion.

“But I say,” Tanis burst out, as though stung to words by de Grandin’s silence, “he can’t take her from me. I can’t say I know much about such things, but surely the law won’t let—”

“Ah bah!” Inspector Renouard’s sardonic laugh cut him short. “The law,” he gibed, “what is it? Parfum d’un chameau. I think in this country it is a code devised to give the criminal license to make the long nose at honest men. Yes.

“A month and more ago I came to this so splendid country in search of one who has most richly deserved the kiss of Madame Guillotine, and here I catch him red-handed in most flagrant crime. ‘You are arrest,’ I tell him. ‘For wilful murder, for sedition and subornation of sedition and for stirring up rebellion against the Republic of France I make you arrested.’ Voilà.

“I take him to the Ministry of Justice. ‘Messieurs,’ I say, ‘I have here a very noted criminal whom I desire to return to French jurisdiction that he may suffer according to his misdoings.’ Certainly.

“Alors, what happens? The gentlemen at the Palais de Justice tell me: ‘It shall be even as you say.’

“Do they assist me? Hélas, entirely otherwise. In furtherance of his diabolical designs this one has here abducted a young American lady and on her has committed the most abominable assault. For this, say the American authorities, he must suffer.

“‘Oh, no,’ they answer me. ‘We shall incarcerate him in the bastille for ten years; perhaps fifteen.’

“‘Bien alors,’ I tell them, ‘let us compose our differences amicably. Me, I have traced this despicable one clear across the world, I have made him arrested for his crimes; I am prepared to take him where a most efficient executioner will decapitate his head with all celerity. Voilà tout; a man dies but once, let this one die for the crime which is a capital offense by the laws of France, and which is not, but should be capital by American law. That way we shall both be vindicated.’ Is not my logic absolute? Would not a three-year-old child of most deficient intellect be convinced by it? Of course; but these ones? Non.

“‘We sympathize with you,’ they tell me, ‘but tout la même he stays with us to expiate his crime in prison.’ Then they begin his prosecution.

“Grand Dieu, the farce that trial is! First come the lawyers with their endless tongues and heavy words to make fools of the jury. Next comes a corps of doctors who will testify to anything, so long as they are paid. ‘Not guilty by reason of insanity,’ the verdict is, and so they take him to a madhouse.

“Not only that,” he added, his grievance suddenly becoming vocal again, “they tell me that should this despicable one recover from his madness, he will be discharged from custody and may successfully resist extradition by the Government of France. Renouard is made the fool of! If he could but once get his hands on this criminal, Sun Ah Poy, or if that half-brother of Satan would but manage to escape from the madhouse that I might find him unprotected by the attendants—”

Crash! I ducked my head involuntarily as a missile whistled through the sleet-drenched night, struck the study window a shattering blow and hurtled across the room, smashing against the farther wall with a resounding crack.

Renouard, the Tanises and I leaped to our feet as the egg-like object burst and a sickly-sweet smell permeated the atmosphere, but Jules de Grandin seemed suddenly to go wild. As though propelled by a powerful spring he bounded from the couch, cleared the six feet or so separating him from Sonia in a single flying leap and snatched at the trailing drapery of her dinner frock, ripping a length of silk off with a furious tug and flinging it veilwise about her head. “Out—for your lives, go out!” he cried, covering his mouth and nose with a wadded handkerchief and pushing the girl before him toward the door.

We obeyed instinctively, and though a scant ten seconds intervened between the entry of the missile and our exit, I was already feeling a stinging sensation in my eyes and a constriction in my throat as though a ligature had been drawn around it. Tears were streaming from Renouard’s and Tanis’ eyes, too, as we rushed pell-mell into the hall and de Grandin slammed the door behind us. “What—” I began, but he waved me back.

“Papers—newspapers—all you have!” he ordered hysterically, snatching a rug from the hall floor and stuffing it against the crack between the door and sill.

I took a copy of the Evening News from the hall table and handed it to him, and he fell to tearing it in strips and stuffing the cracks about the door with fierce energy. “To the rear door,” he ordered. “Open it and breath as deeply as you may. I do not think we were exposed enough to do us permanent injury, but fresh air will help, in any event.

“I humbly beg your pardon, Madame Tanis,” he added as he joined us in the kitchen a moment later. “It was most unconventional to set on you and tear your gown to shreds the way I did, but”—he turned to Tanis with a questioning smile—“perhaps Monsieur your husband can tell you what it was we smelled in the study a moment hence.”

“I’ll tell the world I can,” young Donald answered. “I smelt that stuff at Mons, and it darn near put me in my grave. You saved us; no doubt about it, Doctor de Grandin. It’s tricky, that stuff.”

“Name of a thousand pestiferous mosquitoes, yes, what was it?” Renouard put in.

“Phosgene gas—COC12” de Grandin answered. “It was among the earliest of gases used in the late war, and therefore not so deadly as the others; but it is not a healthy thing to be inhaled, my friend. However, I think that in a little while the study will be safe, for that broken window makes a most efficient ventilator, and the phosgene is quickly dissipated in the air. Had he used mustard gas—tiens, one does not like to speculate on such unpleasant things. No.”

There was something grim in the smile which hovered beneath the upturned ends of his tightly waxed wheat-blond mustache. “I damn think Friend Renouard has his wish,” he answered, and a light which heralded the joy of combat shone in his small blue eyes. “If Sun Ah Poy has not burst from his madhouse and come to tell us that the game of hide-and-go-seek is on once more I am much more mistaken than I think. Yes. Certainly.”

The whining, warning whe-e-eng! of a police car’s siren sounded in the street outside and heavy feet tramped my front veranda while heavy fists beat furiously on the door.

“Ouch, God be praised, ye’re all right, Doctor de Grandin, sor!” Detective Sergeant Jeremiah Costello burst into the house, his greatcoat collar turned up round his ears, a shining film of sleet encasing the black derby hat he wore habitually. “We came here hell-bent for election to warn ye, sor,” he added breathlessly. “We just heard it ourselves, an’—”

“That the efficiently resourceful Doctor Sun Ah Poy, of Cambodia and elsewhere, has burst the bonds of bedlam and taken to the warpath, n’est-ce-pas?” de Grandin laughed outright at the Irishman’s amazed expression.

“Come, my friend,” he added, “there is no magic here. I did not gaze into a crystal and go into a trance, then say, ‘I see it all—Sun Ah Poy has escaped from the asylum for the criminal insane and comes to this place to work his mischief.’ Indeed no. Entirely otherwise. Some fifteen minutes gone the good Renouard expressed a wish that Doctor Sun might manage his escape so that the two might come to grips once more, and hardly had the words flown from his lips when a phosgene bomb was merrily tossed through the window, and it was only by a hasty exit we escaped the inconvenience of asphyxiation. I am not popular with many people, and there are those who would shed few tears at my funeral, but I do not know of one who would take pleasure in throwing a stink-bomb through the window to stifle me. No, such clever tricks as that belong to Doctor Sun, who loves me not at all, but who dislikes my friend Renouard even more cordially. Alors, I deduce that Sun Ah Poy is out again and we shall have amusement for some time to come. Am I correct?”

“Check an’ double check, as th’ felly says,” Costello nodded. “’Twas just past dark this evenin’ whilst th’ warders wuz goin’ through th’ State Asylum, seein’ everything wuz shipshape for th’ night, sor, that Doctor Sun did his disappearin’ act. He’d been meek as anny lamb ever since they took him to th’ bughouse, an’ th’ orderlies down there had decided he warn’t such a bad actor, afther all. Well, sor, th’ turnkey passed his door, an’ this Doctor Sun invites him in to see a drawin’ he’s made. He’s a clever felly wid his hands, for all his bein’ crippled, an’ th’ boys at th’ asylum is always glad to see what he’s been up to makin’.

“Th’ pore chap didn’t have no more chance than a sparry in th’ cat’s mouth, sor. Somewhere th’ Chinese divil had got hold of a table-knife an’ ground it to a razor edge. One swipe o’ that across th’ turnkey’s throat an’ he’s floppin’ round th’ floor like a chicken wid its head cut off, not able to make no outcry for th’ blood that’s stranglin’ him. A pore nut ’cross th’ corridor lets out a squawk, an’ Doctor Sun ups an’ cuts his throat as cool as ye’d pare a apple for yer luncheon, sor. They finds this out from another inmate that’s seen it all but had sense enough in his pore crazy head to keep his mouth shut till afther it’s all over.

“Ye know th’ cell doors ain’t locked, but th’ different wards is barred off from each other wid corridors between. This Doctor Sun takes th’ warder’s uniform cap as calm as ye please and claps it on his ugly head, then walks to th’ ward door an’ unlocks it wid th’ keys he’s taken from th’ turnkey. Th’ guard on duty in th’ corridor don’t notice nothin’ till Sun’s clear through th’ door; then it’s too late, for Sun stabs ’im to th’ heart before he can so much as raise his club, an’ beats it down th’ corridor. There’s a fire escape at th’ other end o’ th’ passage—one o’ them spiral things that works like a slide inside a sheet-iron cylinder, ye know. It’s locked, but Sun has th’ key, an’ in a moment he’s slipped inside, locked th’ door behind him an’ slid down faster than a snake on roller skates. He’s into th’ grounds an’ over th’ wall before they even know he’s loose, an’ he must o’ had confederates waitin’ for him outside, for they heard th’ roar of the car runnin’ like th’ hammers o’ hell whilst they’re still soundin’ th’ alarm.

“O’ course th’ State Troopers an’ th’ local police wuz notified, but he seems to ’a’ got clean away, except—”

“Yes, except?” de Grandin prompted breathlessly, his little, round blue eyes sparkling with excitement.

“Well, sor, we don’t rightly know it wuz him, but we’re suspectin’ it. They found a trooper run down an’ kilt on th’ highway over by Morristown, wid his motorcycle bent up like a pretzel an’ not a whole bone left in his body. Looks like Sun’s worrk, don’t it, sor?”

“Nothin’ except he’s gone, evaporated, vanished into thin air, as th’ sayin’ is, sor; but we figured he’s still nursin’ a grudge agin Inspector Renouard an’ you, an’ maybe come to settle it, so we come fast as we could to warn ye.”

“Your figuring is accurate, my friend,” de Grandin answered with another smile. “May we trespass on your good nature to ask that you escort Monsieur and Madame Tanis home? I should not like them to encounter Doctor Sun Ah Poy, for he plays roughly. As for us—Renouard, Friend Trowbridge and me—we shall do very well unguarded for tonight. Good Doctor Sun has shot his bolt; he will not he up to other tricks for a little time, I think, for he undoubtlessly has a hideaway prepared, and to it he has gone. He would not linger here, knowing the entire gendarmerie is on his heels. No. To hit and run, and run as quickly as he hits, will be his policy, for a time, at least.”

“DOCTOR DE GRANDIN—GENTLEMEN!” DONALD Tanis burst into the breakfast room as de Grandin, Renouard and I were completing our morning meal next day. “Sonia—my wife—she’s gone!”

“Yes, sir. She rides every morning, you see, and today she left for a canter in the park at six o’clock, as usual. I didn’t feel up to going out this morning, and lay abed rather late. I was just going down to breakfast when they told me her horse had come back to the stable—alone.”

“Oh, perhaps she had a tumble in the park,” I suggested soothingly. “Have you looked—”

“I’ve looked everywhere,” he broke in. “Soldiers’ Park’s not very large, and if she’d been in it I’d have found her long ago. After what happened last night, I’m afraid—”

“Morbleu, mon pauvre, you fear with reason,” de Grandin cut him short. “Come, let us go. We must seek her—we must find her, right away, at once; without delay, for—”

“If ye plaze, sor, Sergeant Costello’s askin’ for Doctor de Grandin,” announced Nora McGinnis, appearing at the breakfast room door. “He’s got a furrin gentleman wid him,” she amplified as de Grandin gave an exclamation of impatience at the interruption, “an’ says as how he’s most partic’lar to talk wid ye a minit.”

Father Pophosepholos, shepherd of the little flock of Greeks, Lithuanians and Russians composing the congregation of St. Basil’s Church, paused at the doorway beside the big Irish policeman with uplifted hand as he invoked divine blessing on the inmates of the room, then advanced with smiling countenance to take the slim white fingers de Grandin extended. The aged papa and the little Frenchman were firmest friends, though one lived in a thought-world of the Middle-Ages, while the other’s thoughts were modern as the latest model airplane.

“My son,” the old man greeted, “the powers of evil were abroad last night. The greatest treasure in the world was ravished from my keeping, and I come to you for help.”

Father Pophosepholos rose from his chair, and we forgot the cheap, worn stuff of his purple cassock, his broken shoes, even the pinchbeck gold and imitation amethyst of his pectoral cross as he stood in patriarchal majesty with upraised hands and back-thrown head. “The most precious body and blood of our blessed Lord,” he answered sonorously. “Last night, between the sunset and the dawn, they broke into the church and bore away the holy Eucharist.” For a moment he paused, then in all reverence echoed the Magdalen’s despairing cry: “They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him!”

“Ha, do you say it?” The momentary annoyance de Grandin had evinced at the old priest’s intrusion vanished as he gazed at the cleric with a level stare of fierce intensity. “Tell me of the sacrilege. All—tell me all. Right away; at once, immediately. I am all attention!”

Father Pophosepholos resumed his seat and the sudden fire which animated him died down. Once more he was a tired old man, the threadbare shepherd of a half-starved flock. “I saw you smile when I mentioned a treasure being stolen from me,” he told de Grandin gently. “You were justified, my son, for St. Basil’s is a poor church, and I am poorer still. Only the faith which is in me sustains me through the struggle. We ask no help from the public, and receive none; the rich Latins look on us with pity, the Anglicans sometimes give us slight assistance; the Protestant heretics scarcely know that we exist. We are a joke to them, and, because we’re poor, they sometimes play mischievous pranks on us—their boys stone our windows, and once or twice when parties of their young people have come slumming they have disturbed our services with their thoughtless laughter or ill-bred talking during service. Our liturgy is only meaningless mummery to them, you see.

“But this was no childish mischief, not even the vandalism of irreverent young hoodlums!” his face flushed above its frame of gray beard. “This was deliberately planned and maliciously executed blasphemy and sacrilege!

“Our rubric makes no provision for low mass, like the Latins’,” he explained, “and daily celebration of the Eucharist is not enjoined; so, since our ceremony of consecration is a lengthy one, we customarily celebrate only once or twice a week, and the pre-sanctified elements are reserved in a tabernacle on the altar.

“This morning as I entered the sanctuary I found everything in disorder. The veils had been torn from the table, thrown upon the floor and fouled with filth, the ikon of the Virgin had been ripped from the reredos and the tabernacle violated. They had carried off the elements together with the chalice and paten, and in their place had thrust into the tabernacle the putrefying carcass of a cat!” Tears welled in the old man’s eyes as he told of the sacrilege.

Costello’s face went brick-red with an angry flush, for the insult put upon the consecrated elements stung every fiber of his nature. “Bad cess to ’em!” he muttered. “May they have th’ curse o’ Cromwell!”

“They took my chasuble and cope, my alb, my miter and my stole,” the priest continued, “and from the sacristy they took the deacon’s vestments—”

“Grand Dieu, I damn perceive their game!” the little Frenchman almost shouted. “At first I thought this might be but an act of wantonness performed by wicked boys. I have seen such things. Also, the chalice and the paten might have some little value to a thief; but this is no mere case of thievery mixed with sacrilege. Non. The stealing of the vestments is conclusive proof.

“Tell me, mon père,” he interrupted himself with seeming irrelevance, “it is true, is it not, that only the celebrant and the deacon are necessary for the office of consecration? No subdeacon is required?”

“They were already consecrated,” the clergyman returned. “Presanctified, we call it when they are reserved for future services.”

“Mon père, it gives me greatest joy to say I’ll aid in tracking down these miscreants. Monsieur Tanis, unless I am more greatly mistaken than I think, there is direct connection between your lady’s disappearance and this act of sacrilege. Yes, I am sure of it!” He nodded several times with increasing vigor.

“But, my dear fellow,” I expostulated, “what possible connection can there be between—”

“Chut!” he cut me short. “This is the doing of that villain Konstantin! Assuredly. The wife he has again abducted, though he has not attempted to go near the husband. For why? Pardieu, because by leaving Monsieur Donald free he still permits the wife one little, tiny, ray of hope. With vilest subtlety he holds her back from the black brink of despair and suicide that he may force her to compliance to his will by threats against the man she loves. Sacré nom d’un artichaut, I shall say yes! Certainly; of course.”

“You—you mean he’ll make Sonia go with him—leave me—by threats against my life?” young Tanis faltered.

“Précisément. That and more, I fear, Monsieur,” de Grandin answered somberly.

“But what worse can he do than that? You—you don’t think he’ll kill her, do you?” the husband cried.

The little Frenchman rose and paced the study a moment in thoughtful silence. At last: “Courage, mon brave,” he bade, putting a kindly hand on Tanis’ shoulder. “You and Madame Sonia have faced perils—even the perils of the grave—before. Take heart! I shall not hide from you that your present case is as desperate as any you have faced before; but if my guess is right, as heaven knows I hope it is not, your lady stands in no immediate bodily peril. If that were all we had to fear we might afford to rest more easily; as it is—”

“As it is,” Renouard cut in, “let us go with all celerity to St. Basil’s church and look to see what we can find. The trail grows cold, mon Jules, but—”

“But we shall find and follow it,” de Grandin interrupted. “Parbleu, we’ll follow it though it may lead to the fire-doors of hell’s own furnaces, and then—”

The sharp, insistent ringing of the telephone broke through his fervid prophecy.

“This is Miss Wilkinson, supervisor at Casualty Hospital, Doctor Trowbridge,” a professionally precise feminine voice informed me. “If Detective Sergeant Costello is at your office, we’ve a message for him. Officer Hornsby is here, about to go on the table, and insists we put a message through to Sergeant Costello at once. We’ve already called him at headquarters, and they told us—”

“Just a minute,” I bade. “It’s for you, Sergeant,” I told Costello, handing him the instrument.

“Yes,” Costello called into the mouthpiece. “Yes; uh-huh. What? Glory be to God!”

He swung on us with flushing face and blazing eyes. “’Twas Hornsby,” he announced. “He wuz doin’ relief traffic duty out at Auburndale an’ Gloucester Streets, an’ a car run ’im down half an hour ago. There wuz no witnesses to th’ accident, an’ Hornsby couldn’t git th’ license number, but just before they struck ’im he seen a felly ridin’ in th’ car.

“You’ll be rememberin’ Hornsby wuz in th’ raidin’ party that captured this here Doctor Sun?” he asked de Grandin.

“Well, sor, Hornsby’s got th’ camera eye. He don’t forget a face once he’s seen it, even for a second, an’ he tells me Doctor Sun wuz ridin’ in th’ car that bowled ’im over. They run ’im down deliberate, sor, an’ Sun Ah Poy was ridin’ wid a long, tall, black-faced felly wid slantin’ eyebrows an’ a pan like th’ pictures ye see o’ Satan in th’ chur-rches, sor!”

“And what was this one doing with his pan?” Renouard demanded. “Is it that—”

“Pan,” Costello shouted, raising his voice as many people do when seeking to make clear their meaning to a foreigner, “’twas his pan I’m speaking of. Not a pan; his pan—his mush—his map—his puss, ye know.

“Pas possible! The miscreant held a pan of mush for his cat to eat, and a map, also, while his motor car ran down the gendarme?”

“Oh, go sit in a tree—no!” Costello roared. “It’s his face I’m afther tellin’ ye of. Hornsby said he had a face—a face, git me; a face is a pan an’ a pan’s a face—like th’ divil’s, an’ he wuz ridin’ in th’ same car wid this here now Doctor Sun Ah Poy that’s made his getaway from th’ asylum! Savvy?”

“Oh, mais oui,” the Frenchman grinned. “I apprehend. It is another of the so droll American idioms which you employ. Oui-da; I perceive him.”

“’Tis plain as anny pikestaff they meant to do ’im in deliberately,” Costello went on, “an’ they like to made good, too. Th’ pore felly’s collarbone is broke, an’ so is several ribs; but glory be to heaven, they wuz goin’ so fast they bumped ’im clean out o’ th’ road an’ onto th’ sidewalk, an’ they kep’ on goin’ like th’ hammers o’ hell widout waitin’ to see how much they’d hurt ’im.”

“You hear, my friends?” de Grandin cried, leaping to his feet, eyes flashing, diminutive, wheat-blond mustache twitching with excitement like the whiskers of an angry tomcat. “You heard the message of this gloriously devoted officer of the law who sends intelligence to Costello even as he waits to go upon the operating-table? What does it mean? I ask. No, I demand what does it mean?

“Sun Ah Poy rides in a car which maims and injures the police, and with him rides another with a face like Satan’s. Mordieu, mes amis, we shall have hunting worthy of our utmost skill, I think.

“Sun Ah Poy and Konstantin have met and combined against us! Come, my friends, let us take their challenge.

“Come, Renouard, my old one, this is more than mere police work. The enemy laughs at our face, he makes the thumb-nose at us and at all for which we stand. Forward to the battle, brave comrade. Pour la France!”

FOUR OF US—DE GRANDIN, Renouard, Donald Tanis and I—sat before my study fire and stared gloomily into the flames. All day the other three, accompanied by Costello, had combed the city and environs, but neither sign nor clue, trail nor trace of the missing woman could they find.

“By heaven,” Tanis cried, striking his forehead with his hand in impotent fury, “it looks as if the fellow were the devil himself!”

“Not so bad a guess, mon brave,” de Grandin nodded gloomily. “Certain it is he is on friendly terms with the dark powers, and, as usual, Satan is most kindly to his own.”

“Ah bah, mon Jules,” Renouard rejoined, “you do but make a bad matter so much worse with your mumblings of Satan and his cohorts. Is it not sufficient that two poor ladies of this town are placed in deadly peril without your prating of diabolical opponents and—”

“Two ladies?” Tanis interrupted wonderingly. “Why, has he abducted some one else—”

“Bien non,” Renouard’s quick explanation came. “It is of another that I speak, Monsieur. This Konstantin, who has in some way met with Sun Ah Poy and made a treaty of alliance with him, has taken your poor lady for revenge, even as he sought to do when first we met him, but Sun Ah Poy has also reasons to desire similar vengeance of his own, and all too well we know how far his insane jealousy and lust will lead him. Regard me, if you please: As I have previously told you, I came across the world in search of Sun Ah Poy, and took him bloody-handed in commission of a crime of violence. Clear from Cambodia I trailed him, for there he met, and having met, desired a white girl-dancer in the mighty temple shrine at Angkor. Just who she was we do not know for certain, but strongly circumstantial evidence would indicate she was the daughter of a missionary gentleman named Crownshield, an American, who had been murdered by the natives at the instigation of the heathen priests and whose widowed mother had been spirited away and lodged within the temple until she knew the time of woman and her child was born. Then, we suppose, the mother, too, was done to death, and the little white girl reared as a bayadère, or temple-dancer.

“The years went on, and to Cambodia came a young countryman of yours, a citizen of Harrisonville, who met and loved this nameless mystery of a temple coryphée, known only as Thi-bah, the dancing-woman of the temple, and she returned his passion, for in Cambodia as elsewhere, like cries aloud to like, and this milk-skinned, violet-eyed inmate of a heathen shrine knew herself not akin to her brown-faced fellow members of the temple’s corps du ballet.

“Enfin, they did elope and hasten to the young man’s home in this city, and on their trail, blood-lustful as a tiger in the hunt, there followed Sun Ah Poy, determined to retake the girl whom he had purchased from the priests; if possible to slay the man on whom her favor rested, also. Parbleu, and as the shadow follows the body when the sun is low, Renouard did dog the footsteps of this Sun Ah Poy. Yes.

“Tiens, almost the wicked one succeeded in his plans for vengeance, but with the aid of Jules de Grandin, who is a clever fellow, for all his stupid looks and silly ways, I captured him and saved the little lady, now a happy wife and an American citizeness by marriage and adoption.

“How I then fared, how this miscreant of a Sun Ah Poy made apes and monkeys of the law and lodged himself all safely in a madhouse, I have already related. How he escaped and all but gave me my quietus you know from personal, first-hand experience. Certainly.

“Now, consider: Somewhere in the vicinage there lurk these two near-mad men with twin maggots of jealousy and vengeance gnawing at their brains. Your so unfortunate lady is already in their power—Konstantin has scored a point in his game of passion and revenge. But I know Sun Ah Poy. A merchant prince he was in former days, the son of generations of merchant princes, and Chinese merchant princes in the bargain.

“Such being so, I know all well that Sun Ah Poy has not united forces with this Konstantin unless he is assured of compensation. My death? Pouf, a bagatelle! Me he can kill—at least, he can attempt my life—whenever he desires, and do it all unaided. Last night we saw how great his resource is and how casually he tossed a stink-bomb through the window by way of telling me he was at liberty once more. No, no, my friend; he has not joined with Konstantin merely to he assured that Renouard goes home in one of those elaborate containers for the dead your undertakers sell. On the contrary. He seeks to regain the custody of her who flouted his advances and ran off with another man. Thus far his purpose coincides with Konstantin’s. They both desire women whom other men have won. One has succeeded in his quest, at least for the time being; the other still must make his purpose good. Already they have run down a gendarme who stood in their way—thus far they work in concert. Beyond a doubt they will continue to be allies till their plans are consummated. Yes.”

The clatter of the front-door knocker silenced him, and I rose to answer the alarm, knowing Nora McGinnis had long since gone to bed.

“Is there a feller named Renyard here?” demanded a hoarse voice as I swung back the door and beheld a most untidy taximan in the act of assaulting the knocker again.

“There’s a gentleman named Renouard stopping here,” I answered coldly. “What—”

“A’right, tell ’im to come out an’ git his friend, then. He’s out in me cab, drunk as a hard-boiled owl, an’ won’t stir a foot till this here Renyard feller comes fer ’im. Tell ’im to make it snappy, will yuh, buddy. This here Chinaman’s so potted I’m scared he’s goin’ to—”

“A dam’ skinny one, an’ a mean one, too. Orderin’ me about like I wuz a servant or sumpin’, an’—”

“Renouard—de Grandin!” I called over my shoulder. “Come here, quickly, please! There’s a Chinaman out there in that cab—‘a skinny Chinaman,’ the driver calls him—and he wants Renouard to come out to him. D’ye suppose—”

“Sacré nom d’un porc, I damn do!” de Grandin answered. To the taximan he ordered:

“Bring in your passenger at once, my friend. We can not come out to him; but—”

“Say, feller, I ain’t takin’ no more orders from a Frog than I am from a Chink, git me?” the cabman interposed truculently. “You’ll come out an’ git this here drunk, an’ like it, or else—”

“Précisément; or else?” de Grandin shot back sharply, and the porchlight’s rays gleamed on the wicked-looking barrel of his small but deadly automatic pistol. “Will you obey me, or must I shoot?”

The taximan obeyed, though slowly, with many a backward, fearful glance, as though he did not know what instant the Frenchman’s pistol might spit death. From the cab he helped a delicate, bent form muffled to the ears in a dark overcoat, and assisted it slowly up the steps. “Here he is,” he muttered angrily, as he transferred his tottering charge to Renouard’s waiting hands.

The shrouded form reeled weakly at each step as de Grandin and Renouard assisted it down the hall and guided it to an armchair by the fire. For a moment silence reigned within the study, the visitant crouching motionless in his seat and wheezing asthmatically at intervals. At length de Grandin crossed the room, took the wide brim of the black-felt hat which obscured the man’s face in both his hands and wrenched the headgear off.

“Ah?” he ejaculated as the light struck upon the caller’s face. “A-a-ah? I thought as much!”

Renouard breathed quickly, almost with a snort, as he beheld the livid countenance turned toward him. “Sun Ah Poy, thou species of a stinking camel, what filthy joke is this you play?” he asked suspiciously.

The Chinaman smiled with a sort of ghastly parody of mirth. His face seemed composed entirely of parchment-like skin stretched drum-tight above the bony processes; his little, deep-set eyes were terrible to look at as empty sockets in a skull; his lips, paper-thin and bloodless, were retracted from a set of broken and discolored teeth. The countenance was as lifeless and revolting as the mummy of Rameses in the British Museum, and differed from the dead man’s principally in that it was instinct with conscious evil and lacked the majesty and repose of death.

“Does this look like a jest?” he asked in a low, faltering voice, and with a twisted, claw-like hand laid back a fold of his fur overcoat. The silken Chinese blouse within was stained with fresh, warm blood, and the gory spot grew larger with each pulsation of his heart.

“Morbleu, it seems you have collided with just retribution!” de Grandin commented dryly. “Is it that you are come to us for treatment, by any happy chance?”

“Partly,” the other answered as another horrifying counterfeit of mirth writhed across his livid mouth. “Doctor Jules de Grandin is a surgeon and a man of honor; the oath of Aesculapius and the obligation of his craft will not allow him to refuse aid to a wounded man who comes to him for succor, whoever that man may be.”

“Eh bien, you have me there,” de Grandin countered, “but I am under no compulsion to keep your presence here a secret. While I am working on your wound the police will be coming with all haste to take you back in custody. You realize that, of course?”

We cut away his shirt and singlet, for undressing him would have been too hazardous. To the left, between the fifth and sixth ribs, a little in front of the mid-axillary line, there gaped a long incised wound, obviously the result of a knife-thrust. Extensive hemorrhage had already taken place, and the patient was weakening quickly from loss of blood. “A gauze pack and styptic collodion,” de Grandin whispered softly, “and then perhaps ten minims of adrenalin; it’s all that we can do I fear. The state will save electric current by this evening’s work, my friend; he’ll never live to occupy the chair of execution.”

The treatment finished, we propped the patient up with pillows. “Doctor Sun,” de Grandin announced professionally, “it is my duty to inform you that death is very near. I greatly doubt that you will live till morning.”

“I realize that,” the other answered weakly, “nor am I sorry it is so. This wound has brought me back my sanity, and I am once again the man I was before I suffered madness. All I have done while I was mentally deranged comes back to me like memories of a disagreeable dream, and when I think of what I was, and what I have become, I am content that Sun Ah Poy should die.

“But before I go I must discharge my debt—pay you my fee,” he added with another smile, and this time, I thought, there was more of gentleness than irony in the grimace. “My time is short and I must leave some details out, but such facts as you desire shall be yours,” he added.

“This morning I met Konstantin the Russian as I fled the police, and we agreed to join forces to combat you. He seemed to be a man beset, like me, by the police, and gladly did I welcome him as ally.” He paused a moment, and a quick spasm of pain flickered in his face, but he fought it down. “In the East we learn early of some things the Western world will never learn,” he gasped. “The lore of China is filled with stories of some beings whose existence you deride. Yet they are real, though happily they become more rare each day. Konstantin is one of them; not wholly man, nor yet entirely demon, but a dreadful hybrid of the two. Not till he’d taken me to his lair did I discover this—he is a servant of the Evil One.

“It cost my life to come and tell you, but he must be exterminated. My life for his; the bargain is a trade by which the world will profit. What matters Sun Ah Poy beside the safety of humanity? Konstantin is virtually immortal, but he can be killed. Unless you hunt him out and slay him—”

“We know all this,” de Grandin interrupted; “at least, I have suspected it. Tell us while you have time where we may find him, and I assure you we shall do to him according to his sins—”

“Old Shepherd’s Inn, near Chestertown—the old, deserted place padlocked three years ago for violation of the Prohibition law,” the Chinaman broke in. “You’ll find him there at night, and with him—go there before the moon has set; by day he is abroad, and with him goes his captive, held fast in bonds of fear, but when the moon has climbed the heavens—” He broke off with a sigh of pain, and little beads of perspiration shone upon his brow. The man was going fast; the pauses between his words were longer, and his voice was scarcely louder than a whisper.

“Renouard”—he rolled his head toward the Inspector—“in the old days you called me friend. Can you forget the things I did in madness and say good-bye to the man you used to know—will you take my hand, Renouard? I can not hold it out to you—I am too weak, but—”

“Assuredly, I shall do more, mon vieux,” Renouard broke in. “Je vous salue!” He drew himself erect and raised his right hand in stiff and formal military greeting. Jules de Grandin followed suit.

Then, in turn, they took the dying man’s hand in theirs and shook it solemnly.

“Shades—of—honorable—ancestors, comes—now—Sun—Ah—Poy to be among—you!” the Oriental gasped, and as he finished speaking a rattle sounded in his throat and from the corners of his mouth there trickled thin twin streams of blood. His jaw relaxed, his eyes were set and glazed, his breast fluttered once or twice, then all was done.

“Quicker than I thought,” de Grandin commented as he lifted the spare, twisted body from the chair and laid it on the couch, then draped a rug over it. “The moment I perceived his wound I knew the pleural wall was punctured, and it was but a matter of moments before internal hemorrhage set in and killed him, but my calculations erred. I would have said half an hour; he has taken only eighteen minutes to die. We must notify the coroner,” he added practically. “This news will bring great happiness to the police, and rejoice the newspapers most exceedingly, as well.”

“You wonder?” he gave me an astonished glance. “Last night we saw how Konstantin can throw a knife—Renouard’s shoulder is still sore in testimony of his skill. The wonder is he got away at all. I wish he had not died so soon; I should have liked to ask him how he did it.”

SHEPHERD’S INN WAS LIMNED against the back-drop of wind-driven snow like the gigantic carcass of a stranded leviathan. Remote from human habitation or activity, it stood in the midst of its overgrown grounds, skeletal remains of small summer-houses where in other days Bacchus had dallied drunkenly with Aphrodite stood starkly here and there among the rank-grown evergreens and frost-blasted weeds; flanking the building on the left was a row of frontless wooden sheds where young bloods of the nineties had stabled horse and buggy while reveling in the bar or numerous private dining-rooms upstairs; a row of hitching-posts for tethering the teams of more transient guests stood ranked before the porch. The lower windows were heavily barred by rusted iron rods without and stopped by stout wooden shutters within. Even creepers seemed to have felt the blight which rested on the place, for there was no patch of ivy green upon the brickwork which extended upward to the limit of the lower story.

Beneath a wide-boughed pine we paused for council. “Sergeant,” de Grandin ordered, “you and Friend Trowbridge will enter at the rear—I have here the key which fits the door. Keep watchful eyes as you advance, and have your guns held ready, for you may meet with desperate resistance. I would advise that one of you precede the other, and that the first man hold the flashlight, and hold it well out from his body. Thus, if you’re seen by Konstantin and he fires or flings a knife at the light, you will suffer injury only to your hand or arm. Meanwhile, the one behind will keep sharp watch and fire at any sound or movement in the dark—a shotgun is most pleasantly effective at any range which can be had within a house.

“Should you come on him unawares, shoot first and parley afterward. This is a foul thing we face tonight, my friends—one does not parley with a rattlesnake, neither does one waste time with a viper such as this. Non, by no means. And as you hope for pardon of your sins, shoot him but once; no matter what transpires, you are not to fire a second shot. Remember.

“Renouard and I shall enter from the front and work our way toward you. You shall know when we are come by the fact that our flashlight will be blue—the light in that I give you will be red, so you may shoot at any but a blue light, and we shall blaze away whenever anything but red is shown. You understand?”

We stumbled through the snow until we reached the rear door and Costello knelt to fit the key into the lock while I stood guard above him with my gun.

“You or me, sor?” he inquired as the lock unlatched, and even in the excitement of the moment I noted that its mechanism worked without a squeak.

“O.K. Lead th’ way, sor, an’ watch your shtep. I’ll be right behint ye.”

Cautiously we crept through the service hall, darting the red rays of our flash to left and right, through the long-vacant dining-room, finally into the lobby at the front. As yet we saw no sign of Konstantin nor did we hear a sound betokening the presence of de Grandin or Renouard.

The foyer was paved with flagstones set in cement sills, and every now and then these turned beneath our feet, all but precipitating us upon our faces. The air was heavy and dank with that queer, unwholesome smell of earth one associates with graves and tombs; the painted woodwork was dust-grimed and dirty and here and there wallpaper had peeled off in leprous strips, exposing patches of the corpse-gray plaster underneath. From the center of the hall, slightly to the rear, there rose a wide grand staircase of wood. A sweep of my flashlight toward this brought an exclamation of surprise from both of us.

The central flight of stairs which led to the landing whence the side-flights branched to left and right, was composed of three steps and terminated in a platform some six feet wide by four feet deep. On this had been placed some sort of packing-case or table—it was impossible to determine which at the quick glance we gave it, and over this was draped a cover of some dark material which hung down nearly to the floor. Upon this darker covering there lay a strip of linen cloth and upright at the center of the case was fixed some sort of picture or framed object, while at either end there stood what I first took to be candelabra, each with three tall black candles set into its sockets. “Why,” I began in a whisper, it looks like an—”

“Whist, Doctor Trowbridge, sor, there’s some one comin’!” Costello breathed in my ear. “Shall I let ’em have it?” I heard the sharp click of his gunlock in the dark.

“There’s a door behind us,” I whispered back. “Suppose we take cover behind it and watch to see what happens? If it’s our man and he comes in here, he’ll have to pass us, and we can jump out and nab him; if it’s de Grandin and Renouard, we’ll hail them and let them know there’s no one in the rear of the house. What d’ye say?”

We stepped back carefully, and I heard Costello fumbling with the door. “O.K., sor, it’s open,” he whispered. “Watch your shtep goin’ over th’ sill; it’s a bit high.”

I followed him slowly, feeling my way with cautious feet, felt his big bulk brush past me as he moved to close the door; then:

“Howly Moses!” he muttered. “It’s a trap we’re in, sor! It were a snap-lock on th’ door. Who th’ devil’d ’a’ thought o’ that?”

He was right. As the door swung to there came a faint, sharp click of a spring lock, and though we strained and wrenched at the handle, the strong oak panels refused to budge.

The room in which we were imprisoned was little larger than a closet, windowless and walled with tongue-and-groove planks in which a line of coat hooks had been screwed. Obviously at one time it had functioned as a sort of cloak room. For some reason the management had fancied decorations in the door, and some five feet from the floor twin designs of interlacing hearts had been bored through the panels with an auger. I blessed the unknown artist who had made the perforations, for they not only supplied our dungeon generously with air but made it possible for us to see all quarters of the lobby without betraying our proximity.

“Don’t be talkin’, sor,” Costello warned. “There’s some one comin’!”

The door across the lobby opened slowly, and through it, bearing a sacristan’s taper, came a cowled and surpliced figure, an ecclesiastical-looking figure which stepped with solemn pace to the foot of the staircase, sank low in genuflection, then mounted to the landing and lit the candles on the right, retreated, genuflected again, then lit companion candles at the left.

As the wicks took fire and spread a little patch of flickering luminance amid the dark, my first impression was confirmed. The box-like object on the stairs was an altar, clothed and vested in accordance, with the rubric of the Orthodox Greek Church; at each end burned a trinity of sable candles which gave off an unpleasant smell, and in the center stood a gilt-framed ikon.

Now the light fell full upon the sacristan’s face and with a start I recognized Dimitri, the burly Russian Renouard had felled the night we first met Konstantin and Sonia.

The leering altar-wait retired, backed reverently from the parodied sanctuary, returned to the room whence he had entered, and in a moment we heard the sound of chanting mingled with the sharp, metallic clicking of a censer’s chains.

Again Dimitri entered, this time swinging a smoking incense-pot, and close behind him, vested as a Russian priest, walked a tall, impressive figure. Above his sacerdotal garb his face stood out sharply in the candles’ lambent light, smooth-shaven, long-jawed, swarthy of complexion. His coal-black eyes were deep-set under curiously arched brows; his lusterless black hair was parted in the middle and brushed abruptly backward, leaving a down-pointing triangle in the center of his high and narrow forehead which indicated the commencement of a line which was continued in the prominent bowed nose and sharp, out-jutting chin. It was a striking face, a proud face, a face of great distinction, but a face so cruel and evil it reminded me at once of every pictured image of the devil which I had ever seen. Held high between his upraised hands the evil-looking man bore carefully a large chalice of silver-gilt with a paten fitted over it for cover.

The floating cloud of incense stung my nostrils. I sniffed and fought away a strong impulse to sneeze. And all the while my memory sought to classify that strong and pungent odor. Suddenly I knew. On a vacation trip to Egypt I had spent an evening at an Arab camp out in the desert and watched them build their fires of camel-dung. That was it, the strong smell of ammonia, the faintly sickening odor of the carbonizing fumet!

Chanting slowly in a deep, melodious voice, his attendant chiming in with the responses, the mock-priest marched to the altar and placed the sacred vessels on the fair cloth where the candle-rays struck answering gleams from their cheap gilding. Then with a deep obeisance he retreated, turned, and strode toward the doorway whence he came.

Three paces from the portal he came to pause and struck his hands together in resounding claps, once, twice, three times; and though I had no intimation what I was about to see, I felt my heart beat faster and a curious weakness spread through all my limbs as I waited breathlessly.

Into the faint light of the lobby, vague and nebulous as a phantom-form half seen, half apprehended, stepped Sonia. Slowly, with an almost regal dignity she moved. She was enfolded from white throat to insteps in a long and clinging cloak of heavily embroidered linen which one beautiful, slim hand clutched tight round her at the breast. Something familiar yet queerly strange about the garment struck me as she paused. I’d seen its like somewhere, but never on a woman—the candlelight struck full upon it, and I knew. It was a Greek priest’s white-linen over-vestment, an alb, for worked upon it in threads of gold and threads of silver and threads of iridescent color were double-barred Lorraine crosses and three mystic Grecian letters.

“Are you prepared?” the pseudo-priest demanded as he bent his lusterless black eyes upon the girl’s pale face.

“I am prepared,” she answered slowly. “Though this be damnation to my soul and everlasting corruption to my body, I am prepared, if only you will promise me that he shall go unharmed!”

“Think well,” the man admonished, “this rite may be performed only with the aid of a woman pure in heart—a woman in whom there can be found no taint or stain of sin—who gives herself willingly and without reserve, to act the part I call on you to play. Are you such an one?”

“I am such an one,” she answered steadily, though a ripple of heart-breaking horror ran across her blenching lips, even as they formed the words.

“And you make the offer willingly, without reserve?” he taunted. “You know what it requires? What the consequences to your flesh and soul must be?” With a quick motion he fixed his fingers in her short, blond hair and bent her head back till he gazed directly down into her upturned eyes. “Willingly?” he grated. “Without reserve?”

“Willingly,” she answered with a choking sob. “Yes, willingly, ten thousand times ten thousand times I offer up my soul and body without a single reservation, if you will promise—”

Dimitri, who had crouched before the altar, descended with his censer and bowed before the girl till his forehead touched the floor. Then he arose and wrapped the loose ends of his stole about him and passed the censer to the other man, while from a fold of his vestments he drew a strange metal plate shaped like an angel with five-fold outspread wings, and this he waved above her head while she moved slowly toward the altar and the other man walked backward, facing her and censing her with reeking fumes at every step.

A gleam of golden slippers shone beneath her cloak as she approached the lowest of the altar steps, but as she halted for a moment she kicked them quickly off and mounted barefoot to the sanctuary, where she paused a breathless second and blessed herself, but in reverse, commencing at a point below her breast and making the sign of the cross upside-down.

Then on her knees she fell, placing both hands upon the altar-edge and dropping her head between them, and groveled there in utter self-abasement while in a low but steady voice she repeated words which sent the chills of horror through me.

I had not looked inside a Greek book for more than thirty years, but enough of early learning still remained for me to translate what she sang so softly in a firm, sweet voice:

My soul doth magnify the Lord,

And my spirit hath rejoiced

In God my Savior,

For He hath regarded the lowliness

Of His handmaiden …

The canticle was finished. She rose and dropped the linen cloak behind her and stretched her naked body on the altar, where she lay beneath the candles’ softly glowing light like some exquisite piece of carven Carrara marble, still, lifeless, cold.

Chalice and paten were raised and placed upon the living altar-cloth, their hard, metallic weight denting the soft breasts and exquisite torso, their silver-gilt reflecting little halos of brightness on the milk-white skin. The vested man’s voice rose and fell in what seemed to me an endless chant, his kneeling deacon’s heavy guttural intoning the response. On, endlessly on, went the deep chant of celebration, pausing a breathless moment now and then as the order of the service directed that the celebrant should kiss the consecrated place of sacrifice, then hot and avid lips pressed shrinking, wincing flesh.

Now the rite was ended. The priest raised high the chalice with its hallowed contents and turned his back upon the living altar with a scream of cachinnating laughter. “Lucifer, Lord of the World and Prince Supreme of all the Powers of the Air, I hold thy adversary in my hands!” he cried. “To Thee the Victory, Mighty Master, Puissant God of Hell—behold I sacrifice to Thee the Nazarene! His blood be on our heads and on our children’s—”

“Eh bien, Monsieur, I know not of your offspring, but blood assuredly shall be on your head, and that right quickly!” said Jules de Grandin, appearing suddenly in the darkness at the altar-side. A stab of lurid flame, a sharp report, and Konstantin fell forward on his face, a growing smear of blood-stain on his forehead.

A second shot roared answer to the first, and the crouching man in deacon’s robes threw up both hands wildly, as though to hold himself by empty air, then leaned slowly to the left, slid down the altar steps and lay upon the floor, a blotch of moveless shadow in the candlelight.

Inspector Renouard appeared from the altar’s farther side, his smoking service revolver in his hand, a smile of satisfaction on his face. “Tiens, my aim is true as yours, mon Jules,” he announced matter-of-factly. “Shall I give the woman one as well?”

“By no means, no,” de Grandin answered quickly. “Give her rather the charity of covering for her all-charming nudity, my friend. Quick, spread the robe over her.”

Renouard obeyed, and as he dropped the desecrated alb on the still body I saw a look of wonder come into his face. “She is unconscious,” he breathed. “She faints, my Jules; will you revive her?”

“All in good time,” the other answered. “First let us look at this.” He stirred the prostrate Konstantin with the toe of his boot.

How it happened I could not understand, for de Grandin’s bullet had surely pierced his frontal bone, inflicting an instantly-fatal wound, but the prone man stirred weakly and whimpered like a child in pain.

“Have mercy!” he implored. “I suffer. Give me a second shot to end my misery. Quick, for pity’s sake; I am in agony!”

De Grandin smiled unpleasantly. “So the lieutenant of the firing-party thought,” he answered. “So the corporal who administered le coup de grâce believed, my friend. Them you could fool; you can not make a monkey out of Jules de Grandin. No; by no means. Lie here and die, my excellent adorer of the Devil, but do not take too long in doing it, for we fire the building within the quarter-hour, and if you have not finished dying by that time, tiens”—he raised his shoulders in a shrug—“the fault is yours, not ours. No.”

“Hi, there, Doctor de Grandin, sor; don’t be after settin’ fire to this bloody devils’ roost wid me an Doctor Trowbridge cooped up in here!” Costello roared.

“Morbleu,” the little Frenchman laughed as he unlocked our prison, “upon occasion I have roasted both of you, my friends, but luckily I did not do it actually tonight. Come, let us hasten. We have work to do.”

Within the suite which Konstantin had occupied in the deserted house we found sufficient blankets to wrap Sonia against the outside cold, and having thus prepared her for the homeward trip, we set fire to the ancient house in a dozen different spots and hastened toward my waiting car.

Red, mounting flames illuminated our homeward way, but we made no halt to watch our handiwork, for Sonia was moaning in delirium, and her hands and face were hot and dry as though she suffered from typhoid.

“To bed with her,” de Grandin ordered when we reached my house. “We shall administer hyoscine and later give her strychinia and brandy; meanwhile we must inform her husband that the missing one is found and safe. Yes; he will be pleased to hear us say so, I damn think.”

JULES DE GRANDIN, SMELLING most agreeably of Giboulées de Mas toilet water and dusting-powder, extremely dapper-looking in his dinner clothes and matching black-pearl stud and cuff-links, decanted a fluid ounce or so of Napoleon brandy from the silver-mounted pinch bottle standing handily upon the tabouret beside his easy-chair, passed the wide-mouthed goblet beneath his nose, sniffing the ruby liquor’s aroma with obvious approval, then sipped a thimbleful with evident appreciation.

“Attend me,” he commanded, fixing small bright eyes in turn on Donald Tanis and his wife, Detective Sergeant Costello, Renouard and me. “When dear Madame Sonia told us of her strange adventures with this Konstantin, I was amazed, no less. It is not given every woman to live through such excitement and retain her faculties, much less to sail at last into the harbor of a happy love, as she has done. Her father’s fate also intrigued me. I’d heard of his strange suicide and how he did denounce the Bolshevik spy, so I was well prepared to join with Monsieur Tanis and tell her that she was mistaken when she declared the man who kidnapped her was Konstantin. I knew the details of his apprehension and his trial; also I knew he fell before the firing-squad.

“Ah, but Jules de Grandin has the open mind. To things which others call impossible he gives consideration. So when I heard the tale of Konstantin’s execution at Vincennes, and heard how he had been at pains to learn if they would give him the mercy-shot, and when I further heard how he did not die at once, although eight rifle-balls had pierced his breast; I thought, and thought right deeply. Here were the facts—” he checked them off upon his outspread fingers:

“Konstantin was Russian; Konstantin had been shot by eight skilled riflemen—four rifles in the firing-squad of twelve were charged with blanks—he had not died at once, so a mercy-shot was given, and this seemed to kill him to death. So far, so ordinary. But ah, there were extraordinary factors in the case, as well. Oui-da. Of course. Before he suffered execution Konstantin had said some things which showed he might have hope of returning once again to wreak grave mischief on those he hated. Also, Madame Sonia had deposed it had been he who kidnapped her. She was unlikely to have been mistaken. Women do not make mistakes in matters of that kind. No. Assuredly not. Also, we must remember, Konstantin was Russian. That is of great importance.

“Russia is a mixture, a potpourri of mutual conflicting elements. Neither European nor Asiatic, neither wholly civilized nor savage, modern on the surface, she is unchanging as the changeless East in which her taproots lie. Always she has harbored evil things which were incalculably old when the first deep stones of Egypt’s mighty pyramids were laid.

“Now, together with the werewolf and the vampire, the warlock and the witch, the Russian knows another demon-thing called callicantzaros, who is a being neither wholly man nor devil, but an odd and horrifying mixture of the two. Some call them foster-children of the Devil, stepsons of Satan; some say they are the progeny of evil, sin-soaked women and the incubi who are their paramours. They are imbued with semi-immortality, also; for though they may be killed like other men, they must be slain with a single fatal blow; a second stroke, although it would at once kill ordinary humankind, restores their lives—and their power for wickedness.

“So much for the means of killing a callicantzaros—and the means to be avoided. To continue:

“Every so often, preferably once each year about the twenty-fifth of February, the olden feast of St. Walburga, or at the celebration of St. Peter’s Chains on August 1, he must perform the sacrilege known as the Black Mass or Mass to Lucifer, and hold thereby Satanic favor and renew his immortality.

“Now this Black Mass must be performed with certain rules and ceremonies, and these must be adhered to to the letter. The altar is the body of an unclothed woman, and she must lend herself with willingness to the dreadful part she plays. If she be tricked or made to play the part by force, the rite is null and void. Moreover, she must be without a taint or spot of wickedness, a virtuous woman, pure in heart—to find a one like that for such a service is no small task, you will agree.

“When we consider this we see why Konstantin desired Madame Sonia for wife. She was a Russian like himself, and Russian women are servient to their men. Also, by beatings and mistreatment he soon could break what little independence she possessed, and force her to his will. Thus he would be assured of the ‘altar’ for his Devil’s Mass.

“But when he had procured the ‘altar’ the work was but begun. The one who celebrated this unclean rite must do so fully vested as a priest, and he must wear the sacred garments which have been duly consecrated. Furthermore he must use the consecrated elements at the service, and also the sacred vessels.

“If the Host can be stolen from a Latin church or the presanctified elements from an altar of the Greek communion, it is necessary only that the ritual be fulfilled, the benediction said, and then defilement of the elements be made in insult of the powers of Heaven and to the satisfaction of the Evil One. But if the Eucharist is unobtainable, then it is necessary to have a duly ordained priest, one who is qualified to cause the mystery of transubstantiation to take place, to say the office. If this form be resorted to, there is a further awful rite to be performed. A little baby, most usually a boy, who has not been baptized, but whose baby lips are too young and pure for speech and whose soft feet have never made a step, must be taken, and as the celebrant pronounces ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum,’ he cuts the helpless infant’s throat and drains the gushing lifeblood into the chalice, thus mingling it with the transmuted wine.

“It was with knowledge of these facts that I heard Father Pophosepholos report his loss, and when he said the elements were stolen I did rejoice most greatly, for then I knew no helpless little one would have to die upon the altar of the Devil’s Mass.

“And so, with Madame Sonia gone, with the elements and vestments stolen from St. Basil’s Church and with my dark suspicions of this Konstantin’s true character, I damn knew what was planned, but how to find this server of the Devil, this stepson of Satan, in time to stop the sacrilege? Ah, that was the question! Assuredly.

“And then came Sun Ah Poy. A bad man he had been, a very damn-bad man, as Friend Renouard can testify; but China is an old, old land and her sons are steeped in ancient lore. For generations more than we can count they’ve known the demon Ch’ing Shih and his ghostly brethren, who approximate the vampires of the West, and greatly do they fear him. They hate and loathe him, too, and there lay our salvation; for wicked as he was, Doctor Sun would have no dealings with this cursed Konstantin, but came to warn us and to tell us where he might be found, although his coming cost his life.

“And so we went and saw and were in time to stop the last obscenity of all—the defilement of the consecrated Eucharist in honor of the Devil. Yes. Of course.”

“But, Doctor de Grandin, I was the altar at that mass,” Sonia Tanis wailed, “and I did offer myself for the Devil’s service! Is there hope for such as I? Will Heaven ever pardon me? For even though I loathed the thing I did, I did it, and”—she faced us with defiant, blazing eyes—“I’d do it again for—”

“Précisément, Madame,” de Grandin interrupted. “‘For—’ That ‘for’ is your salvation; because you did the thing you did for love of him you married to save him from assassination. ‘Love conquers all,’ the Latin poet tells us. So in this case. Between your sin—if sin it were to act the part you did to save your husband’s life—and its reward, we place the shield of your abundant love. Be assured, chère Madame, you have no need to fear, for kindly Heaven understands, and understanding is forgiveness.”

“But,” the girl persisted, her long, white fingers knit together in an agony of terror, her eyes wide-set with fear, “Donald would never have consented to my buying his safety at such a price, he—”

“Madame,” the little Frenchman fairly thundered, “I am Jules de Grandin. I do not make mistakes. When I say something, it is so. I have assured you of your pardon; will you dispute with me?”

“Oh, Sonia,” the husband soothed, “it’s finished, now, there is no more—”

“Hélas, the man speaks truth, Friend Trowbridge,” de Grandin wailed. “It is finished—there is no more! How true, my friend; how sadly true.