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funny had it not been tragic. He dropped to his knees, bending over the insensible man.
    “The black stigmata!” he muttered, touching the purple-shadowed brow. “I am too late! The coma. Soon—in an hour, or less, the final convulsions... the end! God! It is terrible. He is a dead man!”
    “I’m not so sure,” Sir Denis interrupted. “Forgive me, doctor; my name is Nayland Smith. I have ventured to give an injection—”
    Dr. Cartier stood up excitedly.
    “What injection?” he demanded.
    “I don’t know,” Sir Denis replied calmly.
    “What is this?”
    “I don’t know. I used a preparation of Petrie’s which he called ‘654.’”
    “‘654!’”
    Dr. Cartier dropped upon his knees again beside the insensible man.
    “How long,” he demanded, “since the shadow appeared?”
    “Difficult to say, doctor,” I replied. “He was alone here. But it hasn’t increased.”
    “How long since the injection?”
    Nayland Smith shot out a lean brown wrist and glanced at a gun-metal watch in a leather strap.
    “Forty-three minutes,” he reported.
    Cartier sprang to his feet again.
    “Dr. Smith!” he cried excitedly—and I saw Sir Denis suppress a smile—“this is triumph! From the time that the ecchymosis appears, it never ceases to creep down to the eyes! It has remained static for forty-three minutes, you tell me? This is triumph!”
    “Let us dare to hope so,” said Sir Denis gravely.
    When all arrangements had been completed and the good Dr. Cartier had grasped the astounding fact that Nayland Smith was not a confrere but a super-policeman:
    “It’s very important,” Sir Denis whispered to me, “that this place should be watched tonight. We have to take into consideration”—he gripped my arm—“the possibility that they fail to save Petrie. The formula for ‘654’ must be somewhere here!”
    But we had searched for it in vain; nor was it on his person.
    The driver of the car in which Sir Denis had come, agreed, on terms, to mount guard over the laboratory. He remained in ignorance of the nature of Petrie’s illness; but Dr. Cartier assured us there was no danger of direct infection at this stage.
    And so, poor Petrie having been rushed to the isolation ward, Nayland Smith going with the ambulance, I drove Mme Dubonnet home, leaving the chauffeur from Cannes on guard. Returning, I gave the man freedom of the dinner which Fate had decreed that Petrie and I were not to eat, lent him a repeater, and set out in turn for the hospital.
    This secret war against the strange plague, which threatened to strip the Blue Coast of visitors and prosperity, had aroused the enthusiasm of the whole of that small hospital staff.
    Petrie, with other sufferers from the new pestilence, was lodged in an outbuilding separated from the hospital proper by a stretch of waste land. A porter, after some delay, led me through this miniature wilderness to the door of the isolation ward. The low building was dominated by a clump of pines.
    A nursing sister admitted me, conducting me in silence along a narrow passage to Petrie’s room.
    As I entered, and the sister withdrew, I saw at a glance the cause of the suppressed feverish excitement which I had detected even in the bearing of the lodge porter.
    Dr. Cartier was in tears. He was taking the pulse of the unconscious man. Nayland Smith, standing beside him, nodded to me reassuringly as I came in.
    The purple shadow on Petrie’s brow had encroached no further— indeed, as I thought, was already dispersing!
    Dr. Cartier replaced his watch and raised clasped hands.
    “He is doing well,” said Sir Denis. “‘654’ is the remedy... but what, exactly, is ‘654’?”
    “We must know!” cried Dr. Cartier emotionally. “Thanks to the good God, he will revive from the coma and tell us. We must know! There is no more that I or any man can do now. But Sister Therese is a treasure among nurses, and if there should be a development, she will call me immediately. I shall