"My son was at first bent on going in pursuit of his daughter, but at last ceded to my arguments, and was content to intrust the task to me. Before starting on my difficult enterprise I tried to discover something more as to the manner of my granddaughter's flight. By close inquiries among our neighbours I found that on the evening of her disappearance two men had been seen waiting about in our street, and that these same men had been seen a little later walking quickly towards the canal with a woman supported between them, almost as if they had been carrying her. Each held her by an arm, my informant observed, and her feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground. But the night was dark, and the three passed so quickly in the darkness that my neighbour was conscious only of something indefinitely strange in the bearing of the three; yet on reflecting upon it after, he had been horrified at the idea that he might have seen a corpse carried past in this manner, and might have unconsciously witnessed the end of an assassination. "I was now assured that my granddaughter had been carried away in a fainting and helpless condition, and this idea was speedily confirmed by a discovery which I made in the family sitting-room, where, lying underneath the harpsichord, I found a handkerchief that had been steeped in a solution of an Indian drug, the properties of which I had explained and demonstrated to Fétis. It was a preparation which when smoked or inhaled produces almost immediate giddiness and loss of consciousness; a condition not lasting long, but certainly long enough to allow of the subject being carried quickly for two or three hundred yards. I remembered how minutely Fétis had questioned me about this drug, and how keenly interested he had been in my experiments with it. He had himself smoked a pipe filled with the drug in question, and had calculated the average period of unconsciousness by his own experience. "I had now no doubt that Margharita had been surprised by Fétis alone at her harpsichord, and had been carried from the house in a state of semi-unconsciousness. A gondola was doubtless ready to receive her at the end of the court, where a flight of steps leads down to the canal. "I went again to the palace on the Canal Reggio, and was informed that Fétis had left Venice on the previous evening, with all the English servants. The house had a dismantled air, and I was told that it was left in charge of the old steward, who had lived for nearly half a century in the service of the Venetian nobleman from whom Mr. Topsparkle had purchased the property. Topsparkle was not expected to return to Venice until the following autumn. He had gone to Paris, and would go thence to London, where he had a house in a fashionable quarter.