No more tremors of fear, no more hurried plans for escape, no more hoping for some fortunate circumstance to save her. She felt that her time had come; and she knew that she must succumb to her fate. She saw how well her destruction was planned; she traced out the tragedy with terrific distinctness, she saw herself seized by these great, cruel hands in the first tunnel whose resounding roar could drown her death-shriek, and the pistol fired off at her ear, or the silent knife plunged into her bosom; and she knew how easy it would be for her murderer to leave the car at the next station and escape forever. Before she raised herself from her speechless examination of her drugged servant, she had foreseen her death, and accepted it with a stony despair. She mechanically turned to pull down the window at her own side, but the rough hand of the murderer met hers and arrested the act; his steel-blue eyes gleamed into hers, and drove her back to her corner, where she sat gazing like a dumb animal into the man's face, with her arms folded over her breast, a frail shield which he laughed at. Some minutes passed, the servant partially recovered consciousness, and was plied with a handkerchief saturated with chloroform and pressed to his nostrils; and, when he was swaying to and fro in his seat like a dead man, with every lurch of the car, the ruffian turned to the unhappy woman beside him with a mischievous, fatal look in his coarse face. CHAPTER XXII. PURSUIT OF A FELON. One by one Margaret's faculties deserted her; her power of speech first of all, then her power of motion, her power of resistance, even her power of fear. All save the seeing sense left poor Margaret, and she watched with distended eyeballs and a dull, ghastly feeling of interest the movements of the man who was to murder her. What had he done to her that had thrown her into this helpless lethargy? A faint, sweet odor pervaded the car. It was the insidious chloroform stealing her consciousness from her and deadening every nerve. She saw him take a tiny vial from his pocket, fit a perforated top upon it, and direct a spurt of deadly perfume, fine as a hair, into her face. She tried to move, but could not. The breath was cut off from her nostrils by that fatal jet; she could only gaze with a sad, anguished look into those flaming eyes opposite her. Something in the harrowing intensity of that silent look troubled the man. He missed his aim, and the death-giving essence streamed harmlessly upon the bosom of her dress. Again and again he adjusted the cunning little tube so as to force her to breathe its fatal contents; but his hand trembled, his face waxed white--he quailed before the ghostly appeal of those fixed orbs. Minutes passed. Why did not the man finish his victim. Was ever yet a woman more completely in a murderer's power?