her engagement with Weldon her fiancé would die within the week. He had died--murdered in cold blood--on the evening of the seventh day. Belleville had been most terribly faithful to his awful promise. To the very letter he had kept his dreadful vow. And now--Miss Ottley was his prisoner in her own father's house; and, no doubt, Sir Robert Ottley, sick, enfeebled in body and intellect, was Belleville's puppet instrument to the furtherance of his atrocious purposes. What chance had I--fighting a man so utterly unscrupulous, so strong-willed and remorseless, and endowed with a power so tremendous and far-reaching as the possession of a chemical agent capable of rendering himself imperceptible to mortal sight whenever it should please him to make use of it? How could I or anybody bring such a man to justice? Why, even if I should foil his scheme for my undoing, and were it possible, as well, to get the better of him to the extent of satisfying myself beyond doubt as to his guilt, what court on earth would believe the evidence I could bring forward? A tissue of absurdities; a network of hypotheses and chimeras! I should be laughed at as a madman, a foolish visionary; and he would go scot free with undamaged reputation, free to work his evil will upon an unconscious and defenceless world. Belleville's advantage over me was so manifestly overwhelming that I confess the prospect of entering into a trial of strength and cunning with him daunted me. And yet, if I did not, Weldon's death would surely go unavenged, and Miss Ottley's fate would be sealed. She would be forced into a marriage--somehow or other--with a man she loathed--the murderer of her dead lover. I felt so sure of this that towards morning I resumed my packing. I did not go to bed at all. After breakfast I went out and called at half a dozen newspaper offices. I saw as many journalists, who all promised to paragraph my departure for the East. I then wrote a letter to the Society stating, guardedly, my intention of again visiting the Nile; and I caught the afternoon train to Dover. That night I slept at Calais. On the following day I went to Paris and put myself in the hands of a hairdresser and costumier, who carried on a peculiar business at Montmartre under the secret surveillance and government of the police. For a respectable consideration he effected a complete metamorphosis in my appearance. He speckled my black eyebrows with silver. He shaved off my moustache and beard and dyed my skin a jejeune saffron, my hair a bilious iron-brown. He forbade me to wear a starched collar. He taught me how to walk like an elderly man; and, finally, he provided me with a suit of clothes that fitted fairly well, but which could not be said to possess any other virtue. But the fellow was well worthy of his hire. When he had finished with me I could not recognise myself. The mirror showed me a gaunt piece of human wreckage. I was to the life a decayed gentleman; an unobtrusively