A voice seemed to float in the air near him:  “For the last time—­will you answer?”

With a supreme effort, Jimmie Dale strove to rally his tottering senses.  Did they not understand the stupendous mockery of their questions?  Did they not understand that he did not know?  He had told them so—­perhaps he had better tell them so again.

“I—­” He tried to speak, and found the words thick upon his tongue.  “I—­do not—­know.”

The glass itself was thrust abruptly between his lips.  Some of the contents spilled and trickled upon his chin, and then a flood of it, burning, fiery, poured down his throat.  A flood of it—­and it needed but three drops and there had been ten in the glass!

So this was death—­a hazy, nebulous thing!  There was no pain.  It was like—­like—­nothingness.  And out of the nothingness she came.  Strange that she should come!  Alone she had fought these fiends and outwitted them for—­how long was it?  Three years!  She would be more than ever alone now.  Pray God she did not finally fall into their clutches!

How it burned now, that fatal draught they had forced down his throat, and how it gripped at him and seemed to eat and bore its way into the very tissues!  It was the end, and—­no!  It was stimulating him!  Strength seemed to be returning to his limbs; it seemed as though he were being carried, as though the bonds about him were being loosened; and now his brain seemed to be growing clearer.

He roused up with a startled exclamation.  He was back in the same room in which he had first returned to consciousness after the accident.  He was on the same couch.  The same masked figure was at the same desk.  Had he been dreaming?  Was this then only some horrible, ghastly nightmare through which he had passed?

No, it had been real enough; his clothes, rent and torn, and the blood upon his hands, where the skin had been scraped from his knuckles in the fight, bore evidence to that.  He must then have lost consciousness for a while, though it seemed to him that at no moment, hazy, irrational though his brain might have been, had he become entirely oblivious to what was taking place around him.  And yet it must have been so!

The eyes from behind the mask were fixed steadily upon him, and below the mask there was the hard, unpleasant set to the lips that Jimmie Dale had grown accustomed to expect.

The man spoke abruptly.

“That you find yourself alive, Mr. Dale,” he said grimly, “is no confession of weakness upon the part of those with whom you have had to deal here.  To bear witness to that there is one who is not alive, as you have seen.  That man we knew.  With you it was somewhat different.  Your presence in the taxicab was only suspicious.  There was always the possibility that you might be one of those ubiquitous ’innocent bystanders.’  Your name, your position, the improbability that you could have anything in common with—­shall we say, the matter that so deeply interests us?—­was all in your favour.  However, presumption and probability are the tools of fools.  We do not depend upon them—­we apply the test.  And having applied the test, we are convinced that you have told the truth—­that is all.”