Excerpt: It was a fateful moment?one to be remembered. A fateful moment in the lives and fortunes of some to whom there then came no premonition of evil, no dread of the terrible sword that hung by a hair above their heads, upon whom was cast no shadow through the glare and glitter around them, amid the gay festivities in which each played a part. It was a fateful moment, one brought only by chance to the notice of Nick Carter. It was remembered by the celebrated detective, moreover, only because of two incidents that would have been entirely unnoticed by a less keen and discerning man. One was the single stroke of a tall, old-fashioned clock in the main hall of the great mansion. It struck the half after ten. The hall in which it struck, and in which Nick Carter then was standing, was that of the magnificent Carrington mansion on Washington Heights, the home of the wealthy railway magnate, Horace K. Carrington, a millionaire fifty times over, and prominent with his handsome wife in the most fashionable and exclusive circles of New York society.