Page:Gaston Leroux--The man with the black feather.djvu/219

Rh greater risks in serving me than in disobeying me. They betrayed me; and it was quite logical. Oh, it's quite time for these reflections, now that I'm in the charnel-house!

"'I'm alive in this charnel-house, alive among the dead; and for the first time in my life I am frightened.'

"Theophrastus was silent for a minute; and we looked at one another with harried eyes. Then in the same mournful, plaintive tones he took up his tale again.

"'It's odd—very odd. Now that I'm on the very boundary of life and death my senses perceive things which they could not perceive when I was in health. My ears hear no more—that boiling water destroyed my hearing—yet they do hear. There is a footfall, a slinking footfall on the steps leading down to the grating… Suddenly the moon ceases to light the charnel-house… Then I see between me and the moon on the steps of the charnel-house, a man! a living man!… Maybe I am saved! I wanted to cry aloud with joy; and perhaps I should have cried aloud, if the horror of what I feel, of what I know, had not sealed my lips. I feel, I know that this man has come to rob me of my hand… I read it, clearly, in his brain. A lady of the Court has sent