Lionel caught at the edge of a table for support. His brain reeled—all the pulses of his being seemed to stand still in awful dread. “Murdered! Percy Osmond murdered!” He breathed the words rather than spoke them aloud. Then for the first time he saw that all those frightened eyes clustered in the doorway were fixed, not on him, but on the terrible token which he was still holding in his hand. He dropped it with a shudders and strode forward towards the door. They all shrank back as though he were stricken with the plague. “Great Heaven! they cannot suspect that I have done the deed!” he whispered to himself. “We must see to this at once,” he said aloud. No one spoke. There was a dead, ominous silence. The crimson stains on his shirt were visible, and every eye was now fixed on them. Lionel paused for a moment at the threshold to gather nerve. As he stood thus, Pierre Janvard came quickly out of Osmond’s room, carrying some small article between the thumb and finger of his right hand. His face was paler than usual, and his half-closed eyes had a sort of feline expression in them which was not pleasant to look upon. “If you please, sir, is this your property?” he said, addressing himself to Lionel, and displaying a small jet stud set in filigree gold. Lionel’s fingers went up instinctively to his shirt front in search of the missing stud. “Yes, that is my property,” he said. “Where did you find it?” “I found it just now, sir, clutched in the hand of Mr. Percy Osmond, who lies murdered in the next room.” CHAPTER XII. TOM BRISTOW’S RETURN. “What can be sweeter or more charming than an English May-day? I declare I’ve seen nothing in the East at all comparable to it.” The speaker was Tom Bristow; the person addressed was a casual compagnon de voyage, whose acquaintance he had made during the Channel passage; and the scene was a first-class compartment in the mail train from Dover to London. “You wouldn’t be so ready to praise an English May-day if you had been here last week, as I was,” was the reply. “No sunshine—not a gleam; but, in place of it, a confounded east wind that was almost keen enough to shave you. Every second fellow you met spoke to you through his nose; and when you did happen to get near a fire, you were frozen through on one side before you were half warmed through on the other.” “Well, it’s pleasant enough now, in all conscience,” said Tom, with a smile of easy content.