Miss Parsons stared at me like a mad creature, flung from her the Eye of Horus, and rushing back into the room of death, was out of the window before we could reach her.
Never before had the Priscilla Alden been smirched by scandal. The managers were in despair. But the suicide from a window on the thirteenth floor, and the story of my vision in the room opposite, combined with the romance of Nella and Morosini, attracted new clients instead of driving away the old.
"Miss Parsons," identified in death, proved to be an ex-convict, who had mysteriously disappeared from the ken of the police months before. Thanks, however, to that page of The World, missing from Dr. Thorne's office, her tragedy in an attempt to steal the Egyptian Eye of Horus carried me one step further on my own quest.
EPISODE IV
THE DEATH TRYST
For me, one of the strangest things in a strange world is this: the compelling influence exerted upon our lives by people apparently irrelevant, yet without whom the pattern of our destiny would be different.
Take the case of Anne Garth and her connection with Maida Odell—through Maida Odell, with me. Of my adventures in America while attempting to protect Maida, that in which Anne Garth played her part was among the most curious.
It happened while Paul Teano, the private detective, and I were trying our hardest to bring "Doctor Rameses" to book. We were morally certain that he was the Egyptian who had, for a mysterious reason of his own, persecuted the girl's family, and followed her (as its last surviving member) from Europe to New York. Unfortunately, however, a moral certainty and a certainty which can be proved are as far from one another as the poles. We might believe if we liked that "Doctor Rameses," controlling the Grey Sisterhood, intended evil to the girl who had been induced to join it: but it was "up to us" to prove the connection. So far as the police could learn, Doctor Rameses was as philanthropic as wise. If, as we suggested, his was the spirit guiding more than one criminal organisation in New York, he was the cleverest man at proving an alibi ever known to the force. If we reported his presence in a certain place at a certain time, he was invariably able to show that he had been somewhere else, engaged in innocent if not useful pursuits. As for Maida, her confidence in the veiled woman at the head of the Sisterhood was apparently unbroken. Judging from the little I could find out, she was irritatingly happy in her work among rescued women and children, at the lonely old house on Long Island. No doubt there were genuine cases cared for, which made it hard to prove anything crooked, especially to a girl so high-minded.
She had promised to remain for a year, and I had met her too late to change that determination. The rules of the House did not permit the sisters (of whom there were only six) to receive the visits of men, and though now and then I contrived to snatch a glimpse of Maida, seldom or never since our real parting had I had word from her except by letter. How could I be sure the letters were genuine?