“Steindal’s face assumed a demoniacal expression,” she said, when, long afterwards, she was able to speak calmly of the unnerving spectacle. “I have read of the lust of murder, but I never knew what it meant until I saw his black eyes emitting a dull, red light, and his lips parting with an animal snarl. He leaped forward at Karl in a peculiar way. He seemed to bring down the bottle with an awful force just as his feet touched the ground. The bottle burst, and its fragments flew on all sides, some of the bits of glass cutting Steindal’s forehead. With an activity I would not have credited in a man of his corpulence, and which he certainly did not exhibit in his normal life, he turned and ran out of the room, upsetting two tables and some chairs, and disappearing through a narrow doorway. Some gentlemen rushed after him, and others helped to raise Karl, who had fallen as one dead headlong on the table. I cannot say why it is, but my last sight of Steindal, bounding across the floor in the effort to escape, reminded me of that dreadful orang-outang described by Edgar Allan Poe in the ‘Murders of the Rue Morgue.’” Nora Cazenove knew nothing of this. She was only acutely aware of the snapping of the invisible link which held her fast. Hence, it is easy enough to understand the different cries of horror and bewilderment with which each girl announced her dread discovery. A policeman, strolling past the Pall Mall exit from the hotel through which Steindal gained the street, supplied a succinct narrative of subsequent events so far as the would-be murderer was concerned. At the kerb was standing an empty hansom, the driver of which was fastening the nose-bag on its accustomed hook beneath the “dicky.” Steindal sprang into the vehicle, leaned over the splash-board, seized the reins and shook the horse into a fast gallop. The animal, a Londoner by adoption, was accustomed to this frenzied leap into activity when a whistling fare was to be secured from a rival. Being a careless beast, it kept on the right side of the road, which, in England, is the wrong side, and after a brief career in comparative safety, encountered a heavy ’bus crunching round the corner from Waterloo Place. Steindal, yelling hysterically in Spanish (he went back to his Mexican mother’s tongue, you see, when the lightning struck him), urged the horse to charge the oncoming Colossus. But the horse knew better than that, and swerved into the open space in front of the Duke of York’s column. The unoccupied square was traversed at full speed. Ere the steed, far wiser than the man, could check his wild progress, he was flying down the long flight of steps into St. James’s Park.