Absurd!
He wiped the perspiration from his brow.
And still the impression grew stronger. He wasn't alone!
With a muttered oath he sprang up and began to pace up and down.
In a minute the woman would return and then -
He stopped dead with a muffled cry.
From beneath the black velvet hangings that draped the window a hand protruded!
He stooped and touched it.
Cold - horribly cold - a dead hand.
With a cry he flung back the curtains.
A woman was lying there, one arm flung wide, the other doubled under her as she lay face downwards, her golden-bronze hair lying in dishevelled masses on her neck.
Olga Stormer!
Tremblingly his fingers sought the icy coldness of that wrist and felt for the pulse.
As he thought, there was none.
She was dead.
She had escaped him, then, by taking the simplest way out.
Suddenly his eyes were arrested by two ends of red cord finishing in fantastic tassels, and half hidden by the masses of her hair.
He touched them gingerly; the head sagged as he did so, and he caught a glimpse of a horrible purple face.
He sprang back with a cry, his head whirling.
There was something here he did not understand.
His brief glimpse of the face, disfigured as it was, had shown him one thing.
This was murder, not suicide.
The woman had been strangled and - she was not Olga Stormer!
Ah!
What was that?
A sound behind him.
He wheeled round and looked straight into the terrified eyes of a maidservant crouching against the wall.
Her face was as white as the cap and apron she wore, but he did not understand the fascinated horror in her eyes until her half- breathed words enlightened him to the peril in which he stood.
"Oh, my God!
You've killed 'er!"
Even then he did not quite realize.
He replied: "No, no, she was dead when I found her."
"I saw yer do it!
You pulled the cord and strangled her.
I 'eard the gurgling cry she give."
The sweat broke out upon his brow in earnest.
His mind went rapidly over his actions of the previous few minutes.
She must have come in just as he had the two ends of cord in his hands; she had seen the sagging head and had taken his own cry as coming from the victim.
He stared at her helplessly.
There was no doubting what he saw in her face - terror and stupidity.
She would tell the police she had seen the crime committed, and no cross-examination would shake her, he was sure of that.
She would swear away his life with the unshakable conviction that she was speaking the truth.
What a horrible, unforeseen chain of circumstances!
Stop, was it unforeseen?
Was there some devilry here?
On an impulse he said, eyeing her narrowly:
"That's not your mistress, you know."
Her answer, given mechanically, threw a light upon the situation.
"No, it's 'er actress friend - if you can call 'em friends, seeing that they fought like cat and dog.
They were at it tonight, 'ammer and tongs."