The path followed by the madman’s brain was easy to pursue once the clue found.  He had been cheated into the belief that Camilla’s body rested in that coffin, and when he had discovered that it did not rest there he had determined that the mistake should be rectified, the false made true.  That had seemed to him logical and just.  She was supposed to be in the coffin; she should really be in the coffin; she should be forced and jammed into it.  And his lunatic and inhuman fancy had added even to that conception.  She should be drugged and carried to the vault, and drugged again, and then immured, unconscious, but alive; and if by chance she awoke from the chloroform sleep after he had finished screwing in the screws, so much the better!  So it was that his mind had worked.  And the scheme had been executed with that courage, that calmness, that audacity, that minute attention to detail, of which only madmen at their maddest appear to be capable.  Beyond any question the scheme would have succeeded had not Hugo, the moment Albert Shawn uttered the word ‘cemetery,’ perceived the general trend of it in a single wondrous flash of intuition.  He had guessed it, and even while afraid to believe that he was right, had known absolutely and convincingly that he was right.

Camilla murmured some phrase, and gave a sigh as she lay on the gravelled path.

She had recovered from the fatal torpor in the cool night air.  He said nothing, because he felt that he could do nothing else.  Albert and Simon were certainly looking for him in the maze of the cemetery; they would find him soon.  It did not seem to him extraordinary that he had left them in that sudden, swift fashion without a word.

Then he heard, or thought he heard, a noise in the vault, and, summoning all his strength of will, he descended the steps again and glanced within.  Ravengar was there.  Had he been there all the time, hidden behind the door?  Or had he fled and stealthily returned?  Only Ravengar could say.  He had taken up the image from the corner and was replacing it in the coffin.  It was as if he had bowed his obstinate purpose to some higher power which was inscrutable to him.  Children and madmen can practise this singular and surprising fatalism.  Disturbed, he raised his head and caught sight of Hugo.  They gazed at one another by the flickering candle.

‘Where’s the man who helped you?’ Hugo demanded faintly.

He had not much heart, much force, much firmness left.  Ravengar’s eyes, at once empty and significant, blank and yet formidable, startled him.  He had the revolver and the handcuffs in his pocket, but he could not have used them.  Ravengar’s eyes, so fiendish and so ineffably sad, melted his spine.  Ravengar stepped forward and Hugo stepped back.

‘Let me pass,’ said Ravengar, in the tone of one who has suffered much and does not mean to suffer much more.

And Hugo let him pass, inexplicably, weakly; and at the end of a narrow path he merged into the vague, general darkness.  And then Hugo heard the sound of a struggle, and the voices of Simon and Albert—­young and boisterous and earthly and sane.  And then scampering footfalls which died away in the uttermost parts of the cemetery.