It was the raven.  The incident recalled him to a sense of the situation, and again his eyes sought the upright coffin, now illuminated by the moon for half its length.  He saw the gleam of the metallic plate and tried without moving to decipher the inscription.  Then he fell to speculating upon what was behind it.  His creative imagination presented him a vivid picture.  The planks no longer seemed an obstacle to his vision and he saw the livid corpse of the dead woman, standing in grave-clothes, and staring vacantly at him, with lidless, shrunken eyes.  The lower jaw was fallen, the upper lip drawn away from the uncovered teeth.  He could make out a mottled pattern on the hollow cheeks—­the maculations of decay.  By some mysterious process his mind reverted for the first time that day to the photograph of Mary Matthews.  He contrasted its blonde beauty with the forbidding aspect of this dead face—­the most beloved object that he knew with the most hideous that he could conceive.

The Assassin now advanced and displaying the blade laid it against the victim’s throat.  That is to say, the man became at first dimly, then definitely, aware of an impressive coincidence—­a relation—­a parallel between the face on the card and the name on the headboard.  The one was disfigured, the other described a disfiguration.  The thought took hold of him and shook him.  It transformed the face that his imagination had created behind the coffin lid; the contrast became a resemblance; the resemblance grew to identity.  Remembering the many descriptions of Scarry’s personal appearance that he had heard from the gossips of his camp-fire he tried with imperfect success to recall the exact nature of the disfiguration that had given the woman her ugly name; and what was lacking in his memory fancy supplied, stamping it with the validity of conviction.  In the maddening attempt to recall such scraps of the woman’s history as he had heard, the muscles of his arms and hands were strained to a painful tension, as by an effort to lift a great weight.  His body writhed and twisted with the exertion.  The tendons of his neck stood out as tense as whip-cords, and his breath came in short, sharp gasps.  The catastrophe could not be much longer delayed, or the agony of anticipation would leave nothing to be done by the coup de grace of verification.  The scarred face behind the lid would slay him through the wood.

A movement of the coffin diverted his thought.  It came forward to within a foot of his face, growing visibly larger as it approached.  The rusted metallic plate, with an inscription illegible in the moonlight, looked him steadily in the eye.  Determined not to shrink, he tried to brace his shoulders more firmly against the end of the excavation, and nearly fell backward in the attempt.  There was nothing to support him; he had unconsciously moved upon his enemy, clutching the heavy knife that he had drawn from his belt.  The coffin had not advanced and he smiled to think it could not retreat.  Lifting his knife he struck the heavy hilt against the metal plate with all his power.  There was a sharp, ringing percussion, and with a dull clatter the whole decayed coffin lid broke in pieces and came away, falling about his feet.  The quick and the dead were face to face—­the frenzied, shrieking man—­the woman standing tranquil in her silences.  She was a holy terror!