“That is the first interesting fact, and the second seems to me to be this:  that those who perished here in living memory all died at different places in the room, and so died that their deaths could not be immediately and undeviatingly traced to the bed.  Hardcastle, for example, as you have related his conversation, did not associate the death of poor Captain May with that of the lady of the hospital eleven years before; and Sir Walter himself saw no reason to connect the still earlier death of his aged aunt, which took place when he was a boy, with the disaster that followed.

“Let us now examine for a moment the amazing fact that none of the stigmata of death was found in those who perished here.

“Death has three modes—­the pale horseman strikes us down by asphyxia, by coma, and by syncope.  In asphyxia he stabs the lungs; in coma his lance is aimed at the brain; in syncope, at the heart.

“When a man dies by asphyxia, it means that the action of the muscles by which he breathes is stopped, or the work of his lungs prevented by injury, or the free passage of air arrested, as in drowning, or strangulation.  It may also mean that embolism has taken place, and the pulmonary artery is blocked, withholding blood from the lungs.  But it was not thus that any died in this chamber.

“Coma occurs through an apoplexy, or concussion; by the use of certain narcotic or mineral poisons; and in various other ways, all of which are ruled out for us.

“There remains syncope.  A heart ceases to beat from haemorrhage, or starvation, from exhaustion, or the depressing influence of certain drugs.  They who died here died from syncope; but why?  No autopsy can tell us why.  They passed with only their Maker to sustain them, and none leaves behind an explanation of what overtook him, or her.  Yet we know full well, even in the case of Peter Hardcastle, concerning whom the police felt doubt, that he was quite dead before Mr. Lennox discovered him and picked him up.  We know that the phenomena of rigor mortis had already set in before his body reached London.

“Nothing, however, is new under the sun.  Many journals related the fact that these people had passed away without a cause, as though it were an event without a parallel.  It is not.  Your Dr. Templeman, in 1893, describes two examples of sudden death with absolute absence of any pathological condition in any part of the bodies to account for it.  He describes the case of a man of forty-three, and calls it ‘emotional inhibition of the heart.’  The heart was arrested in diastole, instead of systole, as is usually the case; the mode of death was syncope; the cause of death, undiscoverable.