Inch by inch his eyes moved until they reached the top shelf of the overmantel and stopped. A shiver shook him as he lay back in his chair, his widespread fingers clutched at the chair arms, a tiny bead of perspiration showed upon the broad forehead.
Staring down at him, shining evilly in the moonlight, was a glistening, unwavering eye.
Just a slanting mother-o'-pearl eye in the battered head of a god or goddess of India, with features almost obliterated by the passage of centuries.
For a full minute Sir Jonathan sat staring up at the eye which stared back; then moving with a convulsive jerk, ran both hands through the mane of silvery hair as though to lift some crushing load from about his head; and turning sideways in his chair stretched out one hand between the eye above and his own as he clumsily seized the pen in the shaking fingers.
"Ah! my God!" he muttered, "the answer is still there, on the tip of my tongue, before my eyes, within reach of my fingers, and I cannot grasp it—ah!—yes——"
Slowly and with infinite pain he wrote, printing the letters in thick and crooked capitals, whilst his breath whistled through the dilated nostrils and one foot beat unceasingly against the desk.
"The answer to the problem concerning Leonie Hetth is in the third volume upon——"
His hand stopped suddenly when the fingers involuntarily spread wide apart, letting fall the pen which rolled across the book; and the silvery head turned inch by inch until the grey eyes had lifted to the one shining in the shadows.
And there commenced a desperate, a bitter struggle for a child's reason, perhaps for a child's life, as the moon gently withdrew her light.
Like the clammy wraiths of fog upon the moor, like the searching tentacles of some blind monster of the sea, fear crept upon the splendid old man in this still hour of the night.