Kennedy was working feverishly, going through the motions of first aid to a drowned man.  Mrs. Ralston was on her knees beside Vanderdyke, kissing his hands and forehead whenever Kennedy stopped for a minute, and crying softly.

“Schuyler, poor boy, I wonder how you could have done it.  I was with him that day.  We rode up in his car, and as we passed through Williston he said he would stop a minute and wish Templeton luck.  I didn’t think it strange, for he said he had nothing any longer against Laura Wainwright, and Templeton only did his duty as a lawyer against us.  I forgave John for prosecuting us, but Schuyler didn’t, after all.  Oh, my poor boy, why did you do it?  We could have gone somewhere else and started all over again—­it wouldn’t have been the first time.”

At last came the flutter of an eyelid and a voluntary breath or two.  Vanderdyke seemed to realise where he was.  With a last supreme effort he raised his hand and drew it slowly across his face.  Then he fell back, exhausted by the effort.

But he had at last put himself beyond the reach of the law.  There was no tourniquet that would confine the poison now in the scratch across his face.  Back of those lack-lustre eyes he heard and knew, but could not move or speak.  His voice was gone, his limbs, his face, his chest, and, last, his eyes.  I wondered if it were possible to conceive a more dreadful torture than that endured by a mind which so witnessed the dying of one organ after another of its own body, shut up, as it were, in the fulness of life, within a corpse.

I looked in bewilderment at the scratch on his face.  “How did he do it?” I asked.

Carefully Craig drew off the azure ring and examined it.  In that part which surrounded the blue lapis lazuli, he indicated a hollow point, concealed.  It worked with a spring and communicated with a little receptacle behind, in such a way that the murderer could give the fatal scratch while shaking hands with his victim.

I shuddered, for my hand had once been clasped by the one wearing that poison ring, which had sent Templeton, and his fiancee and now Vanderdyke himself, to their deaths.

VIII.  “Spontaneous Combustion”

Kennedy and I had risen early, for we were hustling to get off for a week-end at Atlantic City.  Kennedy was tugging at the straps of his grip and remonstrating with it under his breath, when the door opened and a messenger-boy stuck his head in.

“Does Mr. Kennedy live here?” he asked.

Craig impatiently seized the pencil, signed his name in the book, and tore open a night letter.  From the prolonged silence that followed I felt a sense of misgiving.  I, at least, had set my heart on the Atlantic City outing, but with the appearance of the messenger-boy I intuitively felt that the board walk would not see us that week.

“I’m afraid the Atlantic City trip is off, Walter,” remarked Craig seriously.  “You remember Tom Langley in our class at the university?  Well, read that.”