It was the hand of a mummy. It had been half snapped, half torn from the forearm, just above the wrist. Thus the edges of the stock were ragged and the tendons were drawn out and torn; the bone, however, had fractured clearly, just as glass breaks, leaving a hard, smooth edge. But the hand was not an ordinary mummy\'s hand. The bones were covered with mummified flesh truly, but, although dry, it was neither stiff nor brittle. On the contrary, it possessed the tough consistency of leather and was resilient and kneadable like rubber. The phalanges, when pulled straight, returned to their ordinary and original position, like springs, immediately the pressure was removed. The colour of the skin was a very dark chocolate. It was marvellously preserved. The very pores were still discernible, and the veins and arteries beneath the epidermis, which had been converted by age into fine black cords, could be traced with ease. Now, whose hand was it? From what mummy torn? And how had Weldon become possessed of it? I gave up the attempt to solve the first two problems as soon as I had mentally propounded them. The third, [Pg 221]however, answered itself. I knew Weldon too thoroughly to admit a doubt that he would ever have carried about with him such a ghastly trophy. Like most healthy young Englishmen, he had a horror of such things. Well, then he must have snatched the hand, then invisible, from the grasp of someone—in the very moment in which he had been falling to his death. But no one had been near him. That is, no one visible to us or him. But since the hand had been practically invisible until I had subjected it to the influence of heat, was it not just as likely that it might have been—nay, must have been—carried by an invisible person? But that invisible person must have been very near Weldon. He must have been close enough to have saved Weldon had he chosen. Why had he not chosen? Why, indeed, unless he had wished Weldon to die? And if he had wished Weldon to die, would it not have been easy for him—because invisible—to help Weldon to die? Easy! Good heavens, how easy! How appallingly easy! And then I remembered how astonished I had been to see Weldon stagger back, step after step, to the platform\'s edge—three steps at least. I understood it now—and his startled outcry. He had been assailed by an invisible adversary. He had been forced back. He had been hurled over the platform—and as he fell he had clutched out wildly and seized the mummy\'s hand. He had been foully murdered; and we had watched his murder, comprehending nothing. My flesh [Pg 222]began to creep as the light of understanding broke in upon my brain. For I realised in the same instant that Weldon\'s murderer was, in all probability, the man who had had most occasion to desire his death—Belleville—my enemy and the enemy, although the lover, of the woman I loved; the wretch in whose power she was at that moment. He had warned Miss Ottley that unless she broke off 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 capab............