The next moment a cry of vexation broke from him, as he realised when too late his want of foresight. The sudden opening of the door had produced an in-draught of air sufficiently strong to extinguish the flame of the lamp before he could catch even the briefest glimpse of the chamber. Being without flint and steel he was unable to rekindle the flame. As a precaution against being transfixed by hostile blades Wilfrid, on opening the door, had recoiled a few steps, and he now stood with his sword on guard, half-expecting to be attacked, or at the least to be addressed, by some unseen foe. There was neither movement nor speech; the chamber was soundless, its darkness seeming to be not the ordinary darkness of night, but something far blacker, an effect due, Wilfrid intuitively felt, to the fact that the windows of this place, too, were walled up. Now, while he was hesitating whether to go forward a few paces, just to ascertain whether this supposed chamber might not be a corridor, his ear was startled by the sound of something coming through the doorway, something moving low down, a slow, gliding rustle along the floor at the foot of the wall. Wilfrid did not doubt that some one was stealing into the chamber with some deadly design against him, else why this secret and voiceless action? Wilfrid put no question; he gave no warning. Swift as the electric flash his sword descended edgewise upon the quarter whence came the sound, and he had the grim satisfaction of knowing that he had not struck in vain. His sense of feeling told him that the edge of the blade had not only cut the tapestry, but had also passed through some fleshy obstacle, severing it in twain. But the strangeness of the thing!—the victim had uttered no cry! A sensation, such as he had never before known, passed over Wilfrid. For a moment he hesitated; then, impelled almost against his will, he stooped, not neglecting, however, to keep on guard against a possible attack, and, feeling with his left hand in the place where his blade had struck, he grasped something that he immediately relinquished on realising what it was. _A human hand!_ And the man thus maimed had endured the pain without a groan! an apathy so utterly opposed to human nature that Wilfrid recoiled with an eerie thrill. And there he stood, staring at the place where he knew the hand to be, fancying he could see it looking ghastly white through the darkness. If that, outlined beside it, were really a human shape, and not merely a figure woven upon the tapestry, there could be but one solution of the mystery. The victim must be a dumb man, belonging perhaps to the class of those tongueless eunuchs often to be found in the seraglios of the East, though seldom, if ever, in the palace of a Czar. Was he writhing in silent agony? Wilfrid listened for any sound indicative of human presence. But there was no movement; there was not even a breath audible in the place where the handless man should be.