"Not exactly," he answered, fingering it carelessly; "it is in reality a sort of air-gun, with a wonderful compression, and a most ingenious silencer; quite as deadly, they say, as any firearm ever invented. It ejects a cylindrically-shaped bullet, tapered down almost to the fineness of a needle. Now," he added, with a faint smile and a rapid glance round the room, "if only one dared—" he turned in his chair, and I saw the thing steal out below his cuff, "one could free the child quite easily—quite easily."
It was all over in a moment—a wonderful, tense moment, during which I sat frozen to my chair, stricken dumb and motionless with the tragedy which it seemed that I alone had witnessed. For there had been a little puff of sound, so slight that no other ears had noticed it. The seat in front of me was empty, and the man on my right had fallen forwards, his hand pressed to his side, his face curiously livid, patchy with streaks of dark colour, his eyes bulbous. Waiters still hurried to and fro, the hum of conversation was uninterrupted. And then suddenly it came—a cry of breathless horror, of mortal unexpected agony—a cry, it seemed, of death. The waiters stopped in their places to gaze breathlessly at the spot from which the cry had come, a silver dish fell clattering from the fingers of one, and its contents rolled unnoticed about the floor. The murmur of voices, the rise and fall of laughter and speech, ceased as though an unseen finger had been pressed upon the lips of everyone in the room. Men rose in their places, women craned their necks. For a second or two the whole place was like a tableau of arrested motion. Then there was a rush towards the table across which the man had fallen, a doubled-up heap. A few feet away, with only that narrow margin of table-cloth between them, the girl sat and stared at him, still white and panic-stricken, yet with a curious change in her face from which all the dumb terror which had first attracted my attention seemed to have passed away.
CHAPTER IV
The manager, who was very flurried, closed the door of the little room into which the wounded man had been carried.
"Can you tell me his name, or shall we look for his card-case?" he asked.
I glanced towards the child. She was by far the most composed of the three. Only she remained with her back turned steadily upon the sofa.
"His name is Delahaye," she said; "Major Sir William Delahaye, I think they called him."
"And where does he live—in London? Tell me his address. I will send a cab there at once!"
"I do not know his address," the child answered. "I do not know where he lives."