“Was this the direction of your first shot or your second?” The answer came promptly.

“The second; the first was over there!”

He turned a little to the left, more toward the wall where the great safe stood, and pointed.  I followed the direction of his hand and came to the low table whereon rested, amongst other curios, the mummy of the cat which had raised Silvio’s ire.  I got a candle and easily found the mark of the bullet.  It had broken a little glass vase and a tazza of black basalt, exquisitely engraved with hieroglyphics, the graven lines being filled with some faint green cement and the whole thing being polished to an equal surface.  The bullet, flattened against the wall, lay on the table.

I then went to the broken cabinet.  It was evidently a receptacle for valuable curios; for in it were some great scarabs of gold, agate, green jasper, amethyst, lapis lazuli, opal, granite, and blue-green china.  None of these things happily were touched.  The bullet had gone through the back of the cabinet; but no other damage, save the shattering of the glass, had been done.  I could not but notice the strange arrangement of the curios on the shelf of the cabinet.  All the scarabs, rings, amulets, &c. were arranged in an uneven oval round an exquisitely-carved golden miniature figure of a hawk-headed God crowned with a disk and plumes.  I did not wait to look further at present, for my attention was demanded by more pressing things; but I determined to make a more minute examination when I should have time.  It was evident that some of the strange Egyptian smell clung to these old curios; through the broken glass came an added whiff of spice and gum and bitumen, almost stronger than those I had already noticed as coming from others in the room.

All this had really taken but a few minutes.  I was surprised when my eye met, through the chinks between the dark window blinds and the window cases, the brighter light of the coming dawn.  When I went back to the sofa and took the tourniquet from Mrs. Grant, she went over and pulled up the blinds.

It would be hard to imagine anything more ghastly than the appearance of the room with the faint grey light of early morning coming in upon it.  As the windows faced north, any light that came was a fixed grey light without any of the rosy possibility of dawn which comes in the eastern quarter of heaven.  The electric lights seemed dull and yet glaring; and every shadow was of a hard intensity.  There was nothing of morning freshness; nothing of the softness of night.  All was hard and cold and inexpressibly dreary.  The face of the senseless man on the sofa seemed of a ghastly yellow; and the Nurse’s face had taken a suggestion of green from the shade of the lamp near her.  Only Miss Trelawny’s face looked white; and it was of a pallor which made my heart ache.  It looked as if nothing on God’s earth could ever again bring back to it the colour of life and happiness.