“Horrible!” said O’Brien, and shuddered.

The little priest, Brown, had arrived while they were talking, and had waited, with characteristic shyness, till they had finished.  Then he said awkwardly: 

“I say, I’m sorry to interrupt.  But I was sent to tell you the news!”

“News?” repeated Simon, and stared at him rather painfully through his glasses.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” said Father Brown mildly.  “There’s been another murder, you know.”

Both men on the seat sprang up, leaving it rocking.

“And, what’s stranger still,” continued the priest, with his dull eye on the rhododendrons, “it’s the same disgusting sort; it’s another beheading.  They found the second head actually bleeding into the river, a few yards along Brayne’s road to Paris; so they suppose that he—­”

“Great Heaven!” cried O’Brien.  “Is Brayne a monomaniac?”

“There are American vendettas,” said the priest impassively.  Then he added:  “They want you to come to the library and see it.”

Commandant O’Brien followed the others towards the inquest, feeling decidedly sick.  As a soldier, he loathed all this secretive carnage; where were these extravagant amputations going to stop?  First one head was hacked off, and then another; in this case (he told himself bitterly) it was not true that two heads were better than one.  As he crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence.  Upon Valentin’s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of Valentin himself.  A second glance showed him it was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note.  But O’Brien was an Irishman, with a kind of chastity even in his sins; and his gorge rose against that great brutality of the intellect which belongs only to France.  He felt Paris as a whole, from the grotesques on the Gothic churches to the gross caricatures in the newspapers.  He remembered the gigantic jests of the Revolution.  He saw the whole city as one ugly energy, from the sanguinary sketch lying on Valentin’s table up to where, above a mountain and forest of gargoyles, the great devil grins on Notre Dame.

The library was long, low, and dark; what light entered it shot from under low blinds and had still some of the ruddy tinge of morning.  Valentin and his servant Ivan were waiting for them at the upper end of a long, slightly-sloping desk, on which lay the mortal remains, looking enormous in the twilight.  The big black figure and yellow face of the man found in the garden confronted them essentially unchanged.  The second head, which had been fished from among the river reeds that morning, lay streaming and dripping beside it; Valentin’s men were still seeking to recover the rest of this second corpse, which was