It descended—­the whole canopy, with the fringe round it, came down—­down—­close down; so close that there was not room now to squeeze my finger between the bedtop and the bed.  I felt at the sides, and discovered that what had appeared to me from beneath to be the ordinary light canopy of a four-post bed was in reality a thick, broad mattress, the substance of which was concealed by the valance and its fringe.  I looked up and saw the four posts rising hideously bare.  In the middle of the bedtop was a huge wooden screw that had evidently worked it down through a hole in the ceiling, just as ordinary presses are worked down on the substance selected for compression.  The frightful apparatus moved without making the faintest noise.  There had been no creaking as it came down; there was now not the faintest sound from the room above.  Amid a dead and awful silence I beheld before me—­in the nineteenth century, and in the civilized capital of France—­such a machine for secret murder by suffocation as might have existed in the worst days of the Inquisition, in the lonely inns among the Harz Mountains, in the mysterious tribunals of Westphalia!  Still, as I looked on it, I could not move, I could hardly breathe, but I began to recover the power of thinking, and in a moment I discovered the murderous conspiracy framed against me in all its horror.

My cup of coffee had been drugged, and drugged too strongly.  I had been saved from being smothered by having taken an overdose of some narcotic.  How I had chafed and fretted at the fever-fit which had preserved my life by keeping me awake!  How recklessly I had confided myself to the two wretches who had led me into this room, determined, for the sake of my winnings, to kill me in my sleep by the surest and most horrible contrivance for secretly accomplishing my destruction!  How many men, winners like me, had slept, as I had proposed to sleep, in that bed, and had never been seen or heard of more!  I shuddered at the bare idea of it.

But, ere long, all thought was again suspended by the sight of the murderous canopy moving once more.  After it had remained on the bed—­as nearly as I could guess—­about ten minutes, it began to move up again.  The villains who worked it from above evidently believed that their purpose was now accomplished.  Slowly and silently, as it had descended, that horrible bedtop rose towards its former place.  When it reached the upper extremities of the four posts, it reached the ceiling, too.  Neither hole nor screw could be seen; the bed became in appearance an ordinary bed again—­the canopy an ordinary canopy—­even to the most suspicious eyes.

Now, for the first time, I was able to move—­to rise from my knees—­to dress myself in my upper clothing—­and to consider of how I should escape.  If I betrayed by the smallest noise that the attempt to suffocate me had failed, I was certain to be murdered.  Had I made any noise already?  I listened intently, looking towards the door.