“A layman may be permitted, I suppose, to describe ’emotional inhibition of the heart’ as ‘shock’; but we know, in our cases, that if a shock, it was not a painful one—­perhaps not even an unpleasant one.  Since all other emotions can be pleasant or unpleasant, why must we assume that the supreme emotion of death may not be pleasant also, did we know how to make it so?  Perhaps the Borgia, among their secrets, had discovered this.  At least the familiar signs of death were wholly absent from the countenances of the dead.  The jaws were not set; the familiar, expressions were not changed, as usually happens from rigidity of facial muscles; their faces were not sallow; their temples were not sunk; their brows were not contracted.

“We will now take the victims, one by one, and show how death happened to each of them, yet left no sign that it had happened.  Frankly, the first case alone presented any difficulties to me.  For a time I despaired of proving how the bed had destroyed Sir Walter’s ancestor, because she had not entered it.  But the difficulty becomes clear to one possessing our present knowledge, for once prove the properties of the bed, and the rest follows.  You will say that they were not proved, only guessed.  That was true, until Prince died.  His death crowned my edifice of theory and converted it to fact.  As to why the bed has these properties, that is for science to find out presently.

“To return, then, to the old lady, the ancient woman of your race, who came unexpectedly to the Christmas re-union and was put to sleep in the Grey Room at her own wish.  She was found dead next morning on the floor.  She had not entered the bed.  The exact facts have long disappeared from human knowledge, and it is only possible to re-construct them by inference and the support of those straightforward events that followed.  I conceive, then, that though the old lady did not create the warmth that liberated the evil spirit of the bed and so destroyed her, that warmth was nevertheless artificially created.  What must have happened, think you?  The bed is made up in haste and the fire lighted.  But the fire is a long way from the bed, and would have no effect to create the necessary temperature.  There is, however, a hot-water bottle in the bed, or a hot brick wrapped in flannel.  The old lady is about to enter her bed.  She has extinguished her candle, but the flame of the fire gives light.  She has prayed; she throws off her dressing-gown and flings back the covering of the bed, to fall an instant victim to the miasma.  She drops backward and is found dead next morning, by which time the bottle and bed are also cold.

“Taken alone, I grant this explanation may fail to win your sympathy; but consider the cumulative evidence in store.  The old lady may, of course, have died a natural death.  She may not have turned down the bed.  There is nobody living to tell us.  All that Sir Walter can recollect is that she was found on the floor of the room dead.  Exactly where, he does not remember.  But for my own part I have no doubt whatever that her death took place in that way.