“You need a good night’s rest, my dear sir, and it’s no use climbing to my masthead for nothing. Mullins and I will do best if you don’t mind leaving us to ourselves for the night; but first thing tomorrow morning I shall be at your service again, and I hope there will be some progress to report.” Mullins was waiting for him with all the lights on, his solemn face still more strikingly illuminated. “Look at this, sir, look at this! These are the d’Auvergne Cigarettes!” “So I perceive.” “This stump is the stump of a d’Auvergne Cigarette.” “I hope you enjoyed it, Mullins.” “I didn’t smoke it, sir!” “Who did?” “That’s for you to say, sir; but it’s one of the little things I collected near the scene of the murder, but took for a common cheroot, yesterday morning in Hyde Park.” “Near the actual place?” Thrush had pounced upon the stump, and was holding it under the strongest of the electric lamps. “Under a seat, sir, not above a hundred yards away!” CHAPTER X. SECOND THOUGHTS Pocket had been dreaming again. What else could he expect? Waking, he felt that he had got off cheaply; that he might have been through the nightmare of battle, as described by one who had, and depicted in the engravings downstairs, instead of on a mercifully hazy visit to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s. The trouble was that he had seen the one and not the other, and what he had seen continued to haunt him as he lay awake, but quite horribly when he fell back into a doze. There was nothing nebulous about the vile place then; it was as light and bright as the room in which he lay. The sinister figures in the panelled pens were swathed in white, as he had somewhere read that they always were at nights. Their evil faces were shrouded out of sight. But that only made their defiant, portly figures the more humanly inhuman and terrifying; it was as though they had all risen, in their winding-sheets, from their murderer’s graves. Better by far their beastly faces, that you knew were wax! So he reasoned with himself, and screwed up his courage, and laid hands on one of the shorter figures that he could reach. It rocked stiffly in its place, a most palpable and reassuring waxwork. He unwound the cerements from the hollow and unyielding head; and the face was new to him; it had not been there the other afternoon. It was a young face like his own, as ill-mounted on high shoulders, with thickish lips ajar, and only a pair of intelligent eyes to redeem an apparent heaviness: one and all his own identical characteristics. And no wonder, for the last recruit to the waxen army of murderers was a faithful model of himself.