After he had gone, I snatched open the first paper that came to my hand. It was the _Morning Mail_. I discovered the black scare headline in a second. Yes, sure enough it related how Mr. Cavanagh's valet had found his master lying on the studio floor a little after midnight, stone dead, with a revolver clutched in his right hand. The man had not heard the shot, but he had been awakened by some noise, and he had thought his master had called out to him. He admitted that he was a heavy sleeper, and he did not remember hearing Mr. Cavanagh enter the house. The artist's great picture upon which he had been working for a year, and which was almost finished, was half destroyed by fire, and it looked as though by accident, for a naked gas jet burned perilously close to the easel. The bullet which had killed Mr. Cavanagh had been found by the police embedded in the plaster of a distant wall, near the ceiling. The writer of the article had ingeniously concluded that the artist on entering his studio and observing the fruit of his ardent labours destroyed beyond repair, had, in the first sharp flush of his despair, committed suicide! As for me, when I scanned the page and considered one by one the circumstantial dove-tailing details of that ghastly history--I confess that for a moment I doubted my senses' evidence. A little reflection, however, brought me to a realization of the truth, and a greater respect than ever for a certain eminent surgeon--to wit--Sir Charles Venner. I saw in everything I read, his calm, cold-blooded scheming. On my last glimpse he had been languidly smoking a cigarette, which he must have lighted before the breath had quite departed from poor Cavanagh's mutilated corpse. Perhaps nay, undoubtedly, he had even then been planning how to act, and so arrange matters that no scandal might be associated with the name of his accursed hospital. As clearly as though I had been present I saw him ordering that dreadful funeral; saw him take Cavanagh's latch-key from his chain; saw him direct one of the negroes to prepare a conveyance; saw him lead the negroes carrying the body to a waiting vehicle--and that silent cortége move across the Heath to St. John's Wood. I saw him then open Mr. Cavanagh's door and noiselessly motion the negroes to bear the corpse within. I watched him dispose the body on the floor with scientific calculation as to the proper direction of the bullet, and then climbing upon a chair or perhaps on the negroes' shoulders force the bullet through the curtain into the plaster. Perhaps that noise had awakened Cavanagh's drowsy headed servant! I saw him approach the easel and set fire to the great picture, so as to supply the world with a motive for the suicide--and finally I saw him steal away with his ebony attendants from the house--three dark malignant spirits, veritable caterers of death!