BOOK IV—­NEMESIS

    XXVII From Lips Long Silent

   XXVIII “Romantic!  Too Romantic!”

     XXIX A Strong Man

      XXX The Creeping Shadow

     XXXI Confronted

    XXXII “Why Is that Here?”

   XXXIII Again the Cuckoo-Clock

    XXXIV The Bud—­Then the Deadly Flower

BOOK I

A PROBLEM OF THE FIRST ORDER

I

“Let some one speak!”

The hour of noon had just struck, and the few visitors still lingering among the curiosities of the great museum were suddenly startled by the sight of one of the attendants running down the broad, central staircase, loudly shouting: 

“Close the doors!  Let no one out!  An accident has occurred, and nobody’s to leave the building.”

There was but one person near either of the doors, and as he chanced to be a man closely connected with the museum,—­being, in fact, one of its most active directors,—­he immediately turned about and in obedience to a gesture made by the attendant, ran up the marble steps, followed by some dozen others.

At the top they all turned, as by common consent, toward the left-hand gallery, where in the section marked II, a tableau greeted them which few of them will ever forget.

I say “tableau” because the few persons concerned in it stood as in a picture, absolutely motionless and silent as the dead.  Sense, if not feeling, was benumbed in them all, as in another moment it was benumbed in the breasts of these new arrivals.  Tragedy was there in its most terrible, its most pathetic, aspect.  The pathos was given by the victim,—­a young and pretty girl lying face upward on the tessellated floor with an arrow in her breast and death stamped unmistakably on every feature,—­the terror by the look and attitude of the woman they saw kneeling over her—­a remarkable woman, no longer young, but of a presence to hold the attention, even if the circumstances had been of a far less tragic nature.  Her hand was on the arrow but she had made no movement to withdraw it, and her eyes, fixed upon space, showed depths of horror hardly to be explained even by the suddenness and startling character of the untoward fatality of which she had just been made the unhappy witness.

The director, whose name was Roberts, thought as he paused on the edge of the crowd that he had never seen a countenance upon which woe had stamped so deep a mark; and greatly moved by it, he was about to seek some explanation of a scene to which appearances gave so little clue, when the tall but stooping figure of the Curator entered, and he found himself relieved from a task whose seriousness he had no difficulty in measuring.