The moment those words reached me I stopped and took my place with the crowd going in. Some dim foreshadowing of the truth had crossed my mind when I heard Pesca’s voice through the open door, and when I saw the stranger’s face as he passed me on the stairs of the hotel. Now the truth itself was revealed to me⁠—revealed in the chance words that had just reached my ears. Other vengeance than mine had followed that fated man from the theatre to his own door⁠—from his own door to his refuge in Paris. Other vengeance than mine had called him to the day of reckoning, and had exacted from him the penalty of his life. The moment when I had pointed him out to Pesca at the theatre in the hearing of that stranger by our side, who was looking for him too⁠—was the moment that sealed his doom. I remembered the struggle in my own heart, when he and I stood face to face⁠—the struggle before I could let him escape me⁠—and shuddered as I recalled it.

Slowly, inch by inch, I pressed in with the crowd, moving nearer and nearer to the great glass screen that parts the dead from the living at the Morgue⁠—nearer and nearer, till I was close behind the front row of spectators, and could look in.