To me, however, the disappearance of that dead woman with the fair, pure face was the strangest of all that tangle of astounding facts. That face had impressed me. Its every feature had been riveted indelibly upon my memory, for it was a face which, in life, I should have fallen down and worshipped as an idol, for there was about it a purity and charm which must have been highly attractive, a vivacity in those eyes which, even in death, had held me spell-bound. "I don't see that we can do any more just now," Boyd remarked in a business-like tone to his subordinate. "You've seen the three cards which were beneath the plates on the dining-table?" I asked. "Yes," he responded. "There's some hidden meaning connected with them, but what it's impossible at present to guess. In order to prosecute our inquiries we must preserve secrecy. Nothing must be published yet. Indeed, Patterson, you'll apply to the Coroner at once to take steps to withhold the real state of affairs from the public. If the assassins find that no hue and cry is aroused we may have a far better chance of tracing them, for they may betray themselves." "It's a pity," observed Dick, deeply disappointed. "A first-class sensation of this sort don't occur every day. Why, it's worth four columns if a line." "Be patient," Patterson urged. "You shall have an opportunity of publishing it before long, and I'll see that you are a long way ahead of your contemporaries." "Don't let the news agencies have a word. They always try and get in front of us," said Cleugh, whose particular antagonists were the Central News and the Press Association, which possess facilities for the collection of news and its transmission by wire to the various newspapers that form one of the most marvellous organisations in unknown London. "Leave it to me," said the inspector. "As soon as it's wise to let the public know anything I'll give you permission to publish. The _Comet_ shall be first in the field with it." "Very well," answered Dick, satisfied with Patterson's answer. That officer had been prominent a few years before in the investigations relative to those mysterious assassinations of women in Whitechapel, and was very friendly with "the _Comet_ man," as Cleugh was termed in the journal which he represented. Many were the suggestions we put forth as to how the bodies of the victims could have thus been changed, but no theory we could advance seemed likely to have any foundation in fact. The mystery was certainly one of the strangest that had ever puzzled the crime investigators of London. The cause of its discovery was a most remarkable incident, and at every turn as the investigation proceeded mystery seemed to follow upon mystery, until the whole affair presented so many curious features that a solution of the problem seemed utterly impossible.