Advancing through the doorway thus indicated, they took one look about
them and stood appalled. Nothing in their experience (and they had both
experienced much) had prepared them for the thrilling, the solemn nature
of what they were here called upon to contemplate.

Shall I attempt its description?

A room small and of circular shape, hung with strange tapestries
relieved here and there by priceless curios, and lit, although it was
still daylight, by a jet of rose-colored light concentrated, not on the
rows and rows of books around the lower portion of the room, or on the
one great picture which at another time might have drawn the eye and
held the attention, but on the upturned face of a man lying on a
bearskin rug with a dagger in his heart and on his breast a cross whose
golden lines, sharply outlined against his long, dark, swathing garment,
gave him the appearance of a saint prepared in some holy place for
burial, save that the dagger spoke of violent death, and his face of an
anguish for which Mr. Gryce, notwithstanding his lifelong experience,
found no name, so little did it answer to a sensation of fear, pain, or
surprise, or any of the emotions usually visible on the countenances of
such as have fallen under the unexpected stroke of an assassin.




CHAPTER II.

MYSTERIES.