“Tseklinski!” gasped Sophie, deathly pale, shrinking from the man who had addressed her. “It is you! By Heaven! then we meet, and—and you are the victor! Once I spared your life as I have spared Feodor’s, and this is how you repay me—by arrest! I love Feodor, but I know there is no hope of happiness now I have fallen into your clutches.” “You have deceived me,” cried Matvyèich, angry and bewildered at this revelation. “I have loved and trusted a murderess!” “I—I have risked my life to save you,” she said wildly. “Kiss me once—for the last time,” she implored. He flung her from him with an expression of disgust, coupled with an oath. “You—you cast me aside!” she cried, in dismay. “Then I care nothing for my future.” Addressing Tseklinski, whom I recognised as the renowned and expert Petersburg detective, she shrieked, “When you were my lover I protected you; and through me you escaped the plot for your assassination. Now you arrest me for murder, merely because I removed a tyrant whose inhuman delight was to send innocent persons to Kara——” “Enough, jade!” cried Tseklinski, his face flushed with rage. “We have sought for you long enough, and if Captain Matvyèich is weak enough to be tricked and fooled by you, I am not.” Turning to the officers, he added— “Arrest her, and take her to the Bureau at once.” The men advanced to obey their chief’s command, but ere they could lay a finger upon her she had staggered backward, and had fallen fainting upon the floor. They stooped to raise her, but a look of horror overspread their countenances as one of them removed his hand from the back of her head and found blood upon it. Tseklinski bent, gazed into her face, placed his hand upon her heart, and listened intently. “Dead!” he exclaimed, in a tone of awe. I rushed forward to ascertain the truth. In a moment it flashed upon me. The pin she had worn in her hair had, by the force of the fall, been driven into her scalp, and the deadly Obeah poison upon the point had caused almost instant death. It was a strange vagary of Fate. The harmless-looking weapon with which she had originally intended to assassinate the newly-appointed Chief of Police had caused her own death. Yet even that was preferable to the punishment that awaited her had she lived. For a brief moment only I glanced upon the blanched, handsome features, then hurried from the house. Before midnight I had left Moscow, and was on my way back to London. CHAPTER VI. BY A VANISHED HAND.