his anxiety
must be frightful, since you might have seen him when he struck you, and
might recognise him, and accuse him. Yet he could not possibly avoid
meeting you. Imagine what that man must have felt. He tried to smile
when he saw me, and said he wished he had one of those sleeping tablets
of mine. You understand. He thought I had already missed the one he had
taken, though I had not, and that he had better disarm any possible
suspicion by speaking of the poison carelessly. Then his face turned
almost yellow, and he nearly fainted. He said it was the heat, and I
helped him to his carriage. He looked like a man terrified out of his
senses, and I remembered the fact afterwards, when I found that one
tablet had been stolen; but at the time I attributed it all to his fear
of facing you. Now we know the truth. He tried to murder you, and on the
same day he poisoned your mother."

Kalmon sat quite still when he had finished, and for a long time
Marcello did not move, and made no sound. At last he spoke in a dull
voice.

"I want to kill him myself."

The Professor glanced at him and nodded slowly, as if he understood the
simple instinct of justice that moved him.

"If I see him, I shall kill him," Marcello said slowly. "I am sure I
shall."

"I am afraid that he has escaped," Kalmon answered. "Of course there is
a possibility that he may have had some object in deceiving your
coachman by driving to the railway station, but it is not at all likely.
He probably took the first train to the north."

"But he can be stopped at the frontier!"

"Do you think Corbario is the man to let himself be trapped easily if he
knows that he is pursued?" asked Kalmon incredulously. "I do not."

He rose from his chair and began to walk up and down, his hands behind
him and his head bent.

Marcello paid no attention to him and was silent for a long time,
sitting quite motionless and scarcely seeming to breathe. What he felt
he never could have told afterwards; he only knew that he suffered in
every fibre of his brain and body, with every nerve of his heart and in
every secret recess of his soul. His mother seemed to have been dead so
long, beyond the break in his memory. The dreadful truth he had just
heard made her die again before his eyes, by the hand of the man whom he
and she had trusted.

"Kalmon," he said at last, and the Professor stopped short in his walk.
"Kalmon, do you think she knows?"

It was like the cry of a child,