There was a tremendous commotion and banging at the door, and Jones gripped his pistol tightly.  Something seemed to crash through his brain, clearing it for a second, so that he thought he saw beside him a great veiled figure, with drawn sword and flaming eyes, and sternly approving attitude.

“Remember the eyes!  Remember the eyes!” hissed Thorpe in the air above him.

Jones felt like a god, with a god’s power.  Vengeance disappeared from his mind.  He was acting impersonally as an instrument in the hands of the Invisibles who dispense justice and balance accounts.  He bent down and put the barrel close into the other’s face, smiling a little as he saw the childish efforts of the arms to cover his head.  Then he pulled the trigger, and a bullet went straight into the right eye, blackening the skin.  Moving the pistol two inches the other way, he sent another bullet crashing into the left eye.  Then he stood upright over his victim with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

The Manager wriggled convulsively for the space of a single second, and then lay still in death.

There was not a moment to lose, for the door was already broken in and violent hands were at his neck.  Jones put the pistol to his temple and once more pressed the trigger with his finger.

But this time there was no report.  Only a little dead click answered the pressure, for the secretary had forgotten that the pistol had only six chambers, and that he had used them all.  He threw the useless weapon on to the floor, laughing a little out loud, and turned, without a struggle, to give himself up.

“I had to do it,” he said quietly, while they tied him.  “It was simply my duty!  And now I am ready to face the consequences, and Thorpe will be proud of me.  For justice has been done and the gods are satisfied.”

He made not the slightest resistance, and when the two policemen marched him off through the crowd of shuddering little clerks in the office, he again saw the veiled figure moving majestically in front of him, making slow sweeping circles with the flaming sword, to keep back the host of faces that were thronging in upon him from the Other Region.

* * * * *

The Man Who Found Out

(A Nightmare)

1

Professor Mark Ebor, the scientist, led a double life, and the only persons who knew it were his assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, and his publishers.  But a double life need not always be a bad one, and, as Dr. Laidlaw and the gratified publishers well knew, the parallel lives of this particular man were equally good, and indefinitely produced would certainly have ended in a heaven somewhere that can suitably contain such strangely opposite characteristics as his remarkable personality combined.

For Mark Ebor, F.R.S., etc., etc., was that unique combination hardly ever met with in actual life, a man of science and a mystic.