The coffin reigned in the room; all else was subservient to its massive and sinister presence, and the bright twin-lamps watched over its majesty with dazzling orbs.

Hugo went near the coffin, stepping on tip-toe over the thick-piled rugs, and examined it.  There was no name-plate.  He looked at himself in the mirror, and again he murmured a question:  ‘Why am I here?’ Then he listened attentively, fearfully.  No sound.  His hands travelled to the screwdriver on the mantelpiece, and then fifty of his hands picked up fifty screwdrivers.  And he listened once more.  No sound.

‘I must do it.  I must,’ he thought.

The next moment he was unscrewing the screws in the lid of the coffin, and scarcely had he begun the task when he realized that what he had heard from the balcony was the screwing of these same screws.  There were twelve, and some of them were difficult to start, but in due course he had removed them all, and they stood in a row on their heads on the mantelpiece.  He listened yet again.  No sound.  He had only to push the lid of the coffin to the left or to the right, or to lift it up.  He spent several seconds in deciding whether he should push or lift, and then at length fifty Hugos lifted bodily the lids of fifty coffins.  And after a dreadful hesitation he lowered his gaze and looked.

Yes, it was Camilla!  He had known always that it would be Camilla.

The pale repose of death only emphasized the proud and splendid beauty of that head, with its shut eyes, its mouth firmly closed in a faint smile, and its glorious hair surrounded by all the white frippery of the shroud.  Here lay the mortal part of the incomparable creature who had been coveted by three men and won by one—­for a few brief days’ possession.  Here lay the repository of Ravengar’s secrets, the grave of Hugo’s happiness, the dead mate of Tudor’s desire.  Here lay the eternal woman, symbol of all beauty and all charm, victimized by her own loveliness.  For if she had not been lovely, thought Hugo, if the curves of her cheek and her nostrils and the colour of her skin had been ever so slightly different, the world might have contained one widower, one ruined heart, and one murderer the less that night.

He did not doubt, he could not doubt, after Ravengar’s threats, that she had been murdered.  And yet he was not angry then.  He did not feel a great grief.  He was conscious of no sensation save a numbed and desolate awe.  He had not begun to feel.  Ledging the lid crossways on the coffin, he placed his hand gently upon Camilla’s brow.  It was colder than he had expected, and it had the peculiar hard, inelastic touch of incipient decay—­that touch which communicates a shudder even to the most impassive.

‘I must go,’ he whispered, staring spell-bound at her face.

He was surprised to find drops of moisture falling on the shroud.  They were his tears, and yet he had not known that he was crying.