"His blunt fingers twisted into the flesh deeper and deeper."
"They are the same," remarked the stranger of the microscope to the iron-gray man.
"What is all this?" cried Mortmain in an unnatural voice. His head swam. On the mantel the verdigris-covered dragon's face grinned mockingly at him—it was the face of Flaggs.
"Sir Richard," replied the iron-gray man gravely, "I am Inspector Murtha, of Scotland Yard."
Mortmain started back and his right hand twitched again. Through the silence came the measures of "The Flower Song."
"I regret to say," continued the other, "that it is my most unpleasant duty to arrest you for the murder of Lord Gordon Russell."
At the same instant the veil of Sir Richard's mental temple was rent in twain; out of a blackness so intense that it seemed substantive he saw the two inspectors from Scotland Yard fleeing away and diminishing in size until they seemed but puppets gesturing at the edge of an infinity of white desert; then with equal velocity they were carried forward again, growing bigger and bigger until they loomed like giants in his immediate foreground swinging huge scimitars and waving their arms frantically; the strains of the violins changed to voices shouting so sharply that they pained his ears, and waves of light and cosmic darkness over which scintillated a dazzling aurora followed one another in startling succession, until suddenly his soul, shot out of a tunnel, as it were, landed abruptly in a warm meadow covered with daisies, which dissolved before his eyes into the familiar chamber on Milbank Street. A gray mist floated hissing up through the ceiling, the chairs rocked with a strange rotary swing, and the two inspectors smiled cheerfully at him through a broad and painful band of London sunshine. He swallowed rapidly, and a horrible faintness seized him which gave place to a queer sort of anger.
"There's—some—mistake!" he stuttered. The chairs anchored themselves and the ceiling assumed its normal tint.
"No mistake at all," replied Sir Penniston Crisp.