The man said something in French. John did not hear him, but it did not matter much. He knew. They went downstairs together. Alphonse brought him his hat and stick. The other waiters were gathered in a little knot at the _table d'hote_ door. A fiacre was waiting under the archway. John and the superintendent got into it, and it drove off at once without waiting for directions. They were lighting the lamps in the streets. The dusk was falling, falling like the shadow of death. They drove deeper and ever deeper into it. Time ceased to be. "Nous voici, Monsieur," said the man, gravely, as they pulled up before a building, the long low outline of which was dimly visible. John knew it was the Morgue. He followed his guide down a white-washed passage into a long room. There was a cluster of people at the further end, towards which the man was leading him, and in the dusk there was a subdued whispering, and a sound of trickling water. As they reached the further end, some one turned on the electric light, and it fell full on a man's figure on one of the slabs. A little crowd of people were peering through the glass screen at the toy which the Seine had tired of and cast aside. "Ah! qu'il est beau," said a high woman's voice. John shaded his eyes and looked. The face was turned away, but John knew the hair, fair to whiteness in that brilliant light, as he had often seen it in London ball-rooms. They let him through the glass screen which kept off the crowd, and, oblivious of the many eyes watching him, John bent over the slab and touched the clenched marble hand with the signet-ring on it which he had given him when they were at Oxford together. Yes, it was Archie. The dead face was set in the nervous grin with which he had been wont in life to meet the inevitable and the distasteful. The blue pencillings of dissolution had touched to inexorable distinctness the thin lines of dissipation in the cheek and at the corners of the mouth. The death of the body had overtaken the creeping death of the soul. Their landmarks met. The poor beautiful effeminate face, devoid of all that makes death bearable, stared up at the electric light. An impotent overwhelming compassion, as for some ephemeral irresponsible being of another creation, who knows not how to guide itself in this grim world of law, and has wandered blindfold within the sweep of a vast machinery of which it knew nothing, wrung John's heart. He hid his face in his hands. CHAPTER XV. "For human bliss and woe in the frail thread Of human life are all so closely twined, That till the shears of fate the texture shred, The close succession cannot be disjoined, Nor dare we, from our hour, judge that which comes behind." SIR WALTER SCOTT.