He knelt on the floor--and hesitated. 'Might I ask you, sir, to give me my gloves?' he said. 'They are in my hat, on the chair behind you.'
Henry gave him the gloves. 'I don't know what I may be going to take hold of,' the manager explained, smiling rather uneasily as he put on his right glove.
He stretched himself at full length on the floor, and passed his right arm into the cavity. 'I can't say exactly what I have got hold of,' he said. 'But I have got it.'
Half raising himself, he drew his hand out.
The next instant, he started to his feet with a shriek of terror.
A human head dropped from his nerveless grasp on the floor, and rolled to Henry's feet. It was the hideous head that Agnes had seen hovering above her, in the vision of the night!
The two men looked at each other, both struck speechless by the same emotion of horror. The manager was the first to control himself.
'See to the door, for God's sake!' he said. 'Some of the people outside may have heard me.'
Henry moved mechanically to the door.
Even when he had his hand on the key, ready to turn it in the lock in case of necessity, he still looked back at the appalling object on the floor. There was no possibility of identifying those decayed and distorted features with any living creature whom he had seen--and, yet, he was conscious of feeling a vague and awful doubt which shook him to the soul. The questions which had tortured the mind of Agnes, were now his questions too. He asked himself, 'In whose likeness might I have recognised it before the decay set in?
The likeness of Ferrari? or the likeness of--?' He paused trembling, as Agnes had paused trembling before him. Agnes! The name, of all women's names the dearest to him, was a terror to him now!
What was he to say to her? What might be the consequence if he trusted her with the terrible truth?
No footsteps approached the door; no voices were audible outside.
The travellers were still occupied in the rooms at the eastern end of the corridor.
In the brief interval that had passed, the manager had sufficiently recovered himself to be able to think once more of the first and foremost interests of his life--the interests of the hotel.
He approached Henry anxiously.
'If this frightful discovery becomes known,' he said, 'the closing of the hotel and the ruin of the Company will be the inevitable results.
I feel sure that I can trust your discretion, sir, so far?'
'You can certainly trust me,' Henry answered. 'But surely discretion has its limits,' he added, 'after such a discovery as we have made?'
The manager understood that the duty which they owed to the community, as honest and law-abiding men, was the duty to which Henry now referred.
'I will at once find the means,' he said, 'of conveying the remains privately out of the house, and I will myself place them in the care of the police authorities. Will you leave the room with me? or do you not object to keep watch here, and help me when I return?'
While he was speaking, the voices of the travellers made themselves heard again at the end of the corridor. Henry instantly consented to wait in the room. He shrank from facing the inevitable meeting with Agnes if he showed himself in the corridor at that moment.
The manager hastened his departure, in the hope of escaping notice.
He was discovered by his guests before he could reach the head of the stairs. Henry heard the voices plainly as he turned the key.
