compartment."

She was leaning forward on her seat. "You think of everything. . . .
You'll get me off, Tom?" she asked in a gust of anguish, lifting her veil
brusquely to look at her saviour.

She had uncovered a face like adamant. And out of this face the eyes
looked on, big, dry, enlarged, lightless, burnt out like two black holes
in the white, shining globes.

"There is no danger," he said, gazing into them with an earnestness
almost rapt, which to Mrs Verloc, flying from the gallows, seemed to be
full of force and tenderness. This devotion deeply moved her--and the
adamantine face lost the stern rigidity of its terror. Comrade Ossipon
gazed at it as no lover ever gazed at his mistress's face. Alexander
Ossipon, anarchist, nicknamed the Doctor, author of a medical (and
improper) pamphlet, late lecturer on the social aspects of hygiene to
working men's clubs, was free from the trammels of conventional
morality--but he submitted to the rule of science. He was scientific,
and he gazed scientifically at that woman, the sister of a degenerate, a
degenerate herself--of a murdering type. He gazed at her, and invoked
Lombroso, as an Italian peasant recommends himself to his favourite
saint. He gazed scientifically. He gazed at her cheeks, at her nose, at
her eyes, at her ears. . . . Bad! . . . Fatal! Mrs Verloc's pale lips
parting, slightly relaxed under his passionately attentive gaze, he gazed
also at her teeth. . . . Not a doubt remained . . . a murdering type.
. . . If Comrade Ossipon did not recommend his terrified soul to Lombroso, it
was only because on scientific grounds he could not believe that he
carried about him such a thing as a soul. But he had in him the
scientific spirit, which moved him to testify on the platform of a
railway station in nervous jerky phrases.

"He was an extraordinary lad, that brother of yours. Most interesting to
study. A perfect type in a way. Perfect!"

He spoke scientifically in his secret fear. And Mrs Verloc, hearing
these words of commendation vouchsafed to her beloved dead, swayed
forward with a flicker of light in her sombre eyes, like a ray of
sunshine heralding a tempest of rain.

"He was that indeed," she whispered softly, with quivering lips. "You
took a lot of notice of him, Tom. I loved you for it."

"It's almost incredible the resemblance there was between you two,"
pursued Ossipon, giving a voice to his abiding dread, and trying to
conceal his ne