I felt again. It bore some resemblance to the letter T inverted, and then momentarily, there flashed across my mind the thought that I had somewhere seen an emblem of similar appearance.
Eagerly I ran my hands over it, carefully fingering the centre, and trying to form a clearer idea of what it was like, when I suddenly recollected where I had met its exact counterpart.
“Yes, there is no mistake,” I said in an awed whisper, once more fingering it in breathless excitement.
“The characters must be the same; the centre is the same; it differs in no particular. It is the Seal!”
I stood almost terrified at the unearthly sound of my own words.
Here, in this foul prison, amid all these gruesome surroundings, I had made a strange discovery!
I had deciphered an exact reproduction of the curious seal found upon the body of the woman who had been so mysteriously murdered on that eventful night in Bedford Place—the fatal emblem over which the police of Europe and America had been so puzzled.
The disclosure brought vividly to my mind recollections of the murder which, by rare chance, I detected, and I asked myself whether Fate had decreed that a sketch of the seal should be graven upon the wall of my dungeon.
I am neither a visionary, nor am I superstitious, yet it is probable that my gloomy thoughts, combined with my solitary imprisonment, the lack of exercise, and the horrors of my cell, had produced a slight attack of fever; for while I was musing it seemed as if the mystic symbols assumed divers grotesque shapes, the outlines of which glowed like fire, and that by my side were hideous grinning demons, who assumed a threatening attitude towards me.
My breathing became difficult, my head swam, and I sank backward upon the stone seat.