* * * * *

For long I failed to persuade myself that Isobel had not sustained some ghastly injury from the attack of the cat-woman.  Memories uprose starkly before me of that hlangkuna and the other dreadful death-instruments of the mad Eurasian doctor.  Not even the assurances of the local medical man who had been summoned in haste could convince me.  For I recognized how petty was his knowledge in comparison with that of Dr. Damar Greefe.  But although I trembled to think what her fate might have been if we had arrived a few minutes later, the fact remained (and I returned thanks to Heaven) that she had escaped serious physical injury at the hands of her assailant.

But, alas, to this very hour she sometimes awakes shrieking in the night.  And her terrified cry is always the same:  “The green eyes of Bast!... the green-eyes of Bast!”

CHAPTER XXIX

AN AFTERWORD

I wish it lay in my power to satisfy the curiosity in all quarters expressed respecting the identity of “Nahemah”—­the cat-woman, or psycho-hybrid, who figured in Dr. Damar Greefe’s statement.  But it is my duty, as chronicler of the strange and awful occurrences which at this period disturbed the even tenor of my existence, to state that from the moment in which she leaped from the window of Mrs. Wentworth’s house to the path below, neither I nor any other witness who ever came forward beheld her again.

At the end of a quest which exercised the intricate machinery of New Scotland Yard throughout the length and breadth of the land, Inspector Gatton was compelled to admit himself defeated in this particular.  And his explanation of the failure to apprehend the central figure of the tragedies which had exterminated the house of Coverly was a curious one.

“You know, Mr. Addison,” he said to me one evening, “the more I think of this Nahemah the more I wonder if such a person ever really existed!”

“What do you mean, Gatton?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “I mean that although you and I and others are prepared to testify to the existence of a woman in the case, what do we really know about her (leaving Damar Greefe’s statement out of the question) except that she possessed very remarkable eyes?”

“And very remarkable agility,” I interrupted.

“Yes, I’ll grant you that,” he said; “her agility was certainly phenomenal.  But, still, as I was saying, except for this definite information we have no proof outside the statement of Dr. Damar Greefe that such a person as Nahemah ever existed or at any rate that there ever was a creature possessing the attributes which he ascribed to her.  The Laurels is an ordinary suburban house, which has been leased for a number of years by a ’Mr. and Miss da Costa’—­Damar Greefe, no doubt, and a female companion.  But of his ‘great work’ and so forth there’s not a trace.  There are a lot of Egyptian antiquities, I’ll admit, but not a scrap of evidence; and the rooms evidently used by the female inmate of the household are those of an ordinary cultured Englishwoman.”