rushing off to learn what it was. Elsey was among the first. When he got to the door he was confronted by an unexpected difficulty; he, the landlord, couldn't get into the room. The inspector of police had taken away, not only the ordinary key, but the pass-key also; to make sure that, in his absence, no one should get in. So the only thing, if they wanted to get in, was to send for the inspector, and the key. They sent for him. While he was coming they hung about outside the room. They must have been an odd sight--Elsey, his wife, his guests, and his servants, as they stood there listening. It seems that, considering there was nothing in the room but a corpse, some amazing sounds issued from it. Elsey says he never heard anything like them; they were indescribable. He knocked, he even says he hammered, at the door again and again, demanding to be told who was inside; and what whoever it was was doing; and similar cognate questions; but both his hammerings and his questions went unanswered; and apparently unheeded. The noises had ceased before the inspector came; he pooh-poohed the notion that there ever had been any. But he stopped pooh-poohing when he entered the room. They had left the dead man stretched out on his back on the table; they found him on his face on the floor, with his knees drawn up beneath him. The natural presumption would have been, since he was dead, that somebody must have pushed him off the table on to the floor; but when the doctor came he knocked that theory on the head. He declared that, in the first place, he had not been really dead; that when they left him alone he had returned to some sort of consciousness; that, probably, in his struggles to attract attention he had tumbled from the table on to the floor; to a man in his condition a serious matter; and that fall had finished him; for this time he certainly was dead. Isn't that an odd story?" Although he paused, as if for her to answer, she said nothing; she was waiting for what was yet to come. And, presently, it came; as she knew it would do.