at which the deaths of all the Orvens who died mysteriously occurred.  Finding then that the dire heritage of his race—­the heritage of madness—­is falling or fallen on him, he summons his son from India.  On himself he passes sentence of death:  it is the tradition of the family, the secret vow of self-destruction handed down through ages from father to son.  But he must have aid:  in these days it is difficult for a man to commit the suicidal act without detection—­and if madness is a disgrace to the race, equally so is suicide.  Besides, the family is to be enriched by the insurances on his life, and is thereby to be allied with royal blood; but the money will be lost if the suicide be detected.  Randolph therefore returns and blossoms into a popular candidate.

’For a time he is led to abandon his original plans by the appearance of Maude Cibras; he hopes that she may be made to destroy the earl; but when she fails him, he recurs to it—­recurs to it all suddenly, for Lord Pharanx’s condition is rapidly becoming critical, patent to all eyes, could any eye see him—­so much so that on the last day none of the servants are allowed to enter his room.  We must therefore regard Cibras as a mere addendum to, an extraneous element in, the tragedy, not as an integral part of it.  She did not shoot the noble lord, for she had no pistol; nor did Randolph, for he was at a distance from the bed of death, surrounded by witnesses; nor did the imaginary burglars.  The earl therefore shot himself; and it was the small globular silver pistol, such as this’—­here Zaleski drew a little embossed Venetian weapon from a drawer near him—­’that appeared in the gloom to the excited Hester as a “ball of cotton,” while it was being drawn upward by the Atwood’s machine.  But if the earl shot himself he could not have done so after being stabbed to the heart.  Maude Cibras, therefore, stabbed a dead man.  She would, of course, have ample time for stealing into the room and doing so after the shot was fired, and before the party reached the balcony window, on account of the delay on the stairs in procuring a second light; in going to the earl’s door; in examining the tracks, and so on.  But having stabbed a dead man, she is not guilty of murder.  The message I just now sent by Ham was one addressed to the Home Secretary, telling him on no account to let Cibras die to-morrow.  He well knows my name, and will hardly be silly enough to suppose me capable of using words without meaning.  It will be perfectly easy to prove my conclusions, for the pieces removed from, and replaced in, the floorings can still be detected, if looked for; the pistol is still, no doubt, in Randolph’s room, and its bore can be compared with the bullet found in Lord Pharanx’s brain; above all, the jewels stolen by the “burglars” are still safe in some cabinet of the new earl, and may readily be discovered I therefore expect that the denoument will now take a somewhat different turn.’