“All you want is a new pane of glass, sir,” he said—­“and the thing’s done.”

I anticipate in mentioning it here; but since Constable Hughes has no further place in these records I may perhaps be excused for dismissing him at this point.

He was picked up outside the section house on the following evening with his right hand severed just above the wrist.

CHAPTER XIV

A SCREAM IN THE NIGHT

The day that followed was one of the hottest which we experienced during the heat wave.  It was a day crowded with happenings.  The Burton Room was closed to the public, whilst a glazier worked upon the broken east window and a new blind was fitted to the west.  Behind the workmen, guarded by a watchful commissionaire, yawned the shattered case containing the slipper.

I wondered if the visitors to the other rooms of the Museum realized, as I realized, that despite the blazing sunlight of tropical London, the shadow of Hassan of Aleppo lay starkly on that haunted building?

At about eleven o’clock, as I hurried along the Strand, I almost collided with the girl of the violet eyes!  She turned and ran like the wind down Arundel Street, whilst I stood at the corner staring after her in blank amazement, as did other passers-by; for a man cannot with dignity race headlong after a pretty woman down a public thoroughfare!

My mystification grew hourly deeper; and Bristol wallowed in perplexities.

“It’s the most horrible and confusing case,” he said to me when I joined him at the Museum, “that the Yard has ever had to handle.  It bristles with outrages and murders.  God knows where it will all end.  I’ve had London scoured for a clue to the whereabouts of Hassan and Company and drawn absolutely blank!  Then there’s Earl Dexter.  Where does he come in?  For once in a way he’s living in hiding.  I can’t find his headquarters.  I’ve been thinking—­”

He drew me aside into the small gallery which runs parallel with the Assyrian Room.

“Dexter has booked two passages in the Oceanic.  Who is his companion?”

I wondered, I had wondered more than once, if his companion were my beautiful violet-eyed acquaintance.  A scruple—­perhaps an absurd scruple—­hitherto had kept me silent respecting her, but now I determined to take Bristol fully into my confidence.  A conviction was growing upon me that she and Earl Dexter together represented that third party whose existence we had long suspected.  Whether they operated separately or on behalf of the Moslems (of which arrangement I could not conceive) remained to be seen.  I was about to voice my doubts and suspicions when Bristol went on hurriedly—­

“I have thoroughly examined the Burton Room, and considering that the windows are thirty feet from the ground, that there is no sign of a ladder having stood upon the lawn, and that the iron bars are quite intact, it doesn’t look humanly possible for any one to have been in the room last night prior to Mostyn’s arrival!”