The Beetle: A Mystery

The laboratory door was closed. The stranger was standing a foot or two away from it. I was further within the room, and was subjecting him to as keen a scrutiny as circumstance...

‘No,--I will tell you all about it here.’ She looked about her,--as it struck me queerly. ‘This is just the sort of place in which to unfold a tale like mine. It looks uncanny.’

To have received the cut discourteous from his future father-in-law might have been the most commonplace of incidents,--Lessingham evinced not a trace of discomposure. So far as...

Mr Holt looked as if he was in somebody else’s garments. He was so thin, and worn, and wasted, that the suit of clothes which one of the men had lent him hung upon him as on a s...

‘I wonder what that nice-looking beggar really means, and who he happens to be?’ That was what I said to myself when I returned to the laboratory. ‘If it is true that, now and a...

It is something of a drive from Waterloo to Limehouse,--it seems longer when all your nerves are tingling with anxiety to reach your journey’s end; and the cab I had hit upon pr...

I have been anticipating for some weeks past, that things would become exciting,--and they have. But hardly in the way which I foresaw. It is the old story of the unexpected hap...

‘I am not yet forty. So when I tell you that twenty years ago I was a mere youth I am stating what is a sufficiently obvious truth. It is twenty years ago since the events of wh...

That the house over the way was tenanted was plain to all the world,--at least one occupant sat gazing through the window of the first floor front room. An old woman in a cap,--...

That the man in the bed was the one whom, to my cost, I had suffered myself to stumble on the night before, there could, of course, not be the faintest doubt. And yet, directly...

‘You think so? It was I last night,--I did not mean, if I could help it, to suffer again. To me a dance with you means something.’ She went all red,--adding, as an afterthought,...

I bore him off to supper at the Helicon. All the way in the cab he was trying to tell me the story of how he proposed to Marjorie,--and he was very far from being through with i...

I went to the window; I drew up the blind, unlatching the sash, I threw it open; and clad, or, rather, unclad as I was, I clambered through it into the open air. I was not only...

‘How I reached the open air I cannot tell you,--I do not know. I have a confused recollection of rushing through vaulted passages, through endless corridors, of trampling over p...

As I still stood speechless, motionless, meeting his glance without a twitching of an eyebrow, nor a tremor of the hand, I imagine that he began to consider me with an even clos...

‘Message received that an Arab with a big bundle on his head has been noticed loitering about the neighbourhood of St Pancras Station. He seemed to be accompanied by a young man...

She held the front door open just wide enough to enable Lessingham and me to slip through, then she shut it after us with a bang. She evidently had a strong objection to any int...

I realised, and, so to speak, mentally photographed all the little details of the house in front of which I was standing with what almost amounted to a gleam of preternatural pe...

When I left papa,--or, rather, when papa had driven me from him--I went straight to the man whom I had found in the street. It was late, and I was feeling both tired and worried...

The House was full. Percy and I went upstairs,--to the gallery which is theoretically supposed to be reserved for what are called ‘distinguished strangers,’--those curious anima...

‘Why, when I went I left the front door open. It looks as if I’ve made an idiot of myself after all, and Marjorie’s returned,--let’s hope to goodness that I have.’

The weather out of doors was in tune with my frame of mind,--I was in a deuce of a temper, and it was a deuce of a night. A keen north-east wind, warranted to take the skin righ...

‘I dunno! I ’aven’t seen ’im! Mrs ’Enderson, she says to me! “’Gustus Barley,” she says, “a bloke’s been murdered. That there Harab what I chucked out ’alf a hour ago been and m...

To have tramped about all day looking for work; to have begged even for a job which would give me money enough to buy a little food; and to have tramped and to have begged in va...

As Miss Coleman had paused, as if her narrative was approaching a conclusion, I judged it expedient to make an attempt to bring the record as quickly as possible up to date.

I knew that the light went out. For not the least singular, nor, indeed, the least distressing part of my condition was the fact that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, I...

It was after our second waltz I did it. In the usual quiet corner,--which, that time, was in the shadow of a palm in the hall. Before I had got into my stride she checked me,--t...

I am the happiest woman in the world! I wonder how many women have said that of themselves in their time,--but I am. Paul has told me that he loves me. How long I have made inwa...

I turned towards the booking-office on the main departure platform. As I went, the chief platform inspector, George Bellingham, with whom I had some acquaintance, came out of hi...

All through the night, waking and sleeping, and in my dreams, I wondered what Marjorie could see in him! In those same dreams I satisfied myself that she could, and did, see not...

There was a quality in the voice which I cannot describe. Not only an accent of command, but a something malicious, a something saturnine. It was a little guttural, though wheth...

I pulled up sharply,--as if a brake had been suddenly, and even mercilessly, applied to bring me to a standstill. In front of the window I stood shivering. A shower had recently...

She was--confoundedly; and it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her so. She came into the room, with twinkling eyes, looking radiantly happy,--that sort of look which makes ev...

Mr Lindon was excited,--there is no mistaking it when he is, because with him excitement means perspiration, and as soon as he was out of the cab he took off his hat and began t...

Three in a hansom cab is not, under all circumstances, the most comfortable method of conveyance,--when one of the trio happens to be Sydney Atherton in one of his ‘moments of e...

It was a woman’s clothing, beyond a doubt, all thrown in anyhow,--as if the person who had placed it there had been in a desperate hurry. An entire outfit was there, shoes, stoc...

My first impulse, after Sydney’s disappearance, was to laugh. Why should he display anxiety on my behalf merely because I was to be the sole occupant of an otherwise empty house...

I was in the breakfast-room. Papa, as usual, was late for breakfast, and I was wondering whether I should begin without him, when, chancing to look round, something caught my ey...

It is several years since I bore my part in the events which I have rapidly sketched,--or I should not have felt justified in giving them publicity. Exactly how many years, for...

‘Well, Mr Phillips, it do sound strange to ’ear you talkin’ to me like that. Anybody’d think I’d done something as I didn’t ought to ’a’ done to ’ear you going on. As for what’s...

Paul has stormed the House of Commons with one of the greatest speeches which even he has delivered, and I have quarrelled with papa. And, also, I have very nearly quarrelled wi...

This is the result of Paul’s wish that our engagement should not be announced. He is afraid of papa;--not really, but for the moment. The atmosphere of the House is charged with...

On the afternoon of Friday, June 2, 18--, I was entering in my case-book some memoranda having reference to the very curious matter of the Duchess of Datchet’s Deed-box. It was...

‘Not ten minutes. I was just starting off down the road to the signal box, it’s a good two miles away, when I saw you coming. My God! I thought there was going to be another sma...

Atherton did not wait to see who might or might not be present, but, without even pausing to take breath, he broke into full cry on the instant,--as is occasionally his wont.

I was standing in the middle of the room, Sydney was between the door and me; Mr Holt was in the hall, just outside the doorway, in which he, so to speak, was framed. As Sydney...

The passage into the yard from the electrically lit laboratory was a passage from brilliancy to gloom. The shrouded figure standing in the shadow, was like some object in a drea...

Whether anyone pursued I cannot say. I have some dim recollection, as I came out of the room, of women being huddled against the wall upon the landing, and of their screaming as...

He was in evening dress. He carried a small portfolio in his left hand. If the discovery of my presence startled him, as it could scarcely have failed to do, he allowed no sign...