The end was I married her.

"Poor little thing! I think I might have made her happy--who knows? She
used to tell me often she was happy with me. Poor little thing!

"Well, we were to come straight to London. That was Lucille's notion.
She wanted to go to my London first--nowhere else. Now I would rather
have gone anywhere else; but, naturally, I let the child have her way.
She seemed nervously eager about it, I remembered afterward; seemed to
have a nervous objection to every other place I proposed. But I saw or
suspected nothing to make me question her very closely, or the reasons
for her preference for our grimy old Pandemonium. What could I suspect?
Not the truth. If I only had! If I had only guessed what it was that
made her, as she said, long to be safe there already. Safe? What had she
to fear with me? Ah, what indeed!

"So we started on our journey to England. It was a cold, dark night,
early in March. We reached Lyons somewhere about seven. I should have
stayed there that night but for Lucille. She entreated me so earnestly
and with such strange vehemence to go on by the night-mail to Paris,
that at last, to satisfy her, I consented; though it struck me
unpleasantly at the time that I had let her travel too long already, and
that this feverishness was the consequence of over-fatigue. But she
became pacified at once when I told her it should be as she wanted; and
declared she should sleep perfectly well in the carriage with me beside
her. She should feel quite safe then, she said.

"Safe! Where safer? you might ask. Nowhere, I believe. Alone with
me--surely nowhere safer. The Paris express was a short train that
night; but I managed to secure a compartment for ourselves. I left
Lucille in her corner there while I went across to the _buffet_ to fill
a flask. I was gone barely five minutes; but when I came back the change
in the child's face fairly startled me. I had seen it last with the
smile it always wore for me on it, looking so childishly happy in the
lamp-light. Now it was all gray-pale and distorted; and the great blue
eyes told me directly with what.

"Fear--sudden, terrible fear--I thought. But _fear_? Fear of what? I
asked her. She clung close to me half-sobbing awhile before she could
answer; and then she told me--nothing. There was nothing the matter;
only she had felt a pain--a cruel pain--at her heart; and it had
frightened her. Yes, that was it; it had frightened her, but it had
passed; and she