rvous, sickening impatience for the train to start. "Yes;
he resembled you."

These words were not especially touching or sympathetic. But the fact of
that resemblance insisted upon was enough in itself to act upon her
emotions powerfully. With a little faint cry, and throwing her arms out,
Mrs Verloc burst into tears at last.

Ossipon entered the carriage, hastily closed the door and looked out to
see the time by the station clock. Eight minutes more. For the first
three of these Mrs Verloc wept violently and helplessly without pause or
interruption. Then she recovered somewhat, and sobbed gently in an
abundant fall of tears. She tried to talk to her saviour, to the man who
was the messenger of life.

"Oh, Tom! How could I fear to die after he was taken away from me so
cruelly! How could I! How could I be such a coward!"

She lamented aloud her love of life, that life without grace or charm,
and almost without decency, but of an exalted faithfulness of purpose,
even unto murder. And, as often happens in the lament of poor humanity,
rich in suffering but indigent in words, the truth--the very cry of
truth--was found in a worn and artificial shape picked up somewhere among
the phrases of sham sentiment.

"How could I be so afraid of death! Tom, I tried. But I am afraid. I
tried to do away with myself. And I couldn't. Am I hard? I suppose the
cup of horrors was not full enough for such as me. Then when you came.
. . . "

She paused. Then in a gust of confidence and gratitude, "I will live all
my days for you, Tom!" she sobbed out.

"Go over into the other corner of the carriage, away from the platform,"
said Ossipon solicitously. She let her saviour settle her comfortably,
and he watched the coming on of another crisis of weeping, still more
violent than the first. He watched the symptoms with a sort of medical
air, as if counting seconds. He heard the guard's whistle at last. An
involuntary contraction of the upper lip bared his teeth with all the
aspect of savage resolution as he felt the train beginning to move. Mrs
Verloc heard and felt nothing, and Ossipon, her saviour, stood still. He
felt the train roll quicker, rumbling heavily to the sound of the woman's
loud sobs, and then crossing the carriage in two long strides he opened
the door deliberately, and leaped out.

He had leaped out at the very end of the platform; and such was his
determination in sticking to his desperate plan t