My eyes wandered from the face of the trembling woman before me to the blanched countenance of my love. In an instant I detected a change there. While I had been speaking the muscles had relaxed until that face I adored had become blank and quite expressionless. No deep medical knowledge was necessary to detect the awful truth. It was the exact counterpart of the photograph which had been in the Colonel’s possession.
With a cry of despair I sank upon my knees, touching her cheeks and chafing her hands. I held the mirror against her mouth. But the jaw had dropped, and when I looked eagerly for signs of respiration, there were none. Beryl, my mysterious, unknown wife, was dead.
I pressed her hand, I called her by name, and, aided by her cousin Nora, frantically tried the various modes of artificial respiration. But all in vain. Her frail life had flickered out even while we had been fencing with each other. All was useless. She had, as the Major had predicted during that memorable interview at Whitton, been struck down swiftly and secretly in some manner that was impossible to determine.
“She’s dead!” I cried, still holding her thin, cold hand, and turning to the woman who had brought me to her side. “Dead—dead!”
“Impossible!” she gasped. “No, don’t tell me that. Do your best to save her, Doctor. You must save her—you must!”
“But she is beyond human aid!” I declared. “Respiration has ceased. She has been murdered!”
“By that woman in black!” she shrieked. “But how?”
“That I do not know,” I responded very gravely. “There is no wound; nothing whatever to account for death.”
“Oh!” she cried in desperation, “I ought to have told you everything at once, but I feared you would not believe it if I told you. A strange thing has occurred in this house, something very uncanny. It is as though the place is overshadowed by some evil influence.”
“I don’t understand you,” I answered quickly interested; but ere the words had left my mouth there was a tap at the door, and the servant, ushered in my old friend and lecturer, Carl Hoefer.