wn and began to consider who this man
was, and why he had murdered that child. The big, burly frame, the heavy
yellow face, the sandy-yellow hair, the physiognomy generally, was
Teutonic. My man I put down as a North German. Now there were, and are
probably, plenty of men who would have no objection whatever to put a
knife into me, if they got the chance; but this man, whom I had never
met, could have had no such quarrel as theirs with me. His quarrel with
me must have been, then, Lucille. Yes, that was it--Lucille. I began to
see clearly: a thwarted, devilish passion--a cool, infernal revenge. The
child had feared something of this sort; had perhaps seen him that
night. This explained her nervous terror, her nervous anxiety to stop
nowhere, to travel on. In that carriage of that express-train, alone
with me--where could she be safer? This accounted, too, for her anxiety
to reach England. He would not dare follow her there, she had thought,
or, at least, could not without my noticing him. And then she would have
told me. She had not told me before evidently because she had feared for
_me_ too, in a quarrel with this man. She must, innocent child as she
was, have had some instinctive knowledge of what he was capable.... Ay,
a cool, infernal revenge, indeed. To kill her; to fix the murder on me.
That dagger he had left behind.... The apparent impossibility of any
one's entering the carriage as he must have entered it at all, to say
nothing of the almost absolute impossibility of his doing so without
disturbing either of us,--you see it might have gone hard with me if a
British jury had had to decide on the case.

"Well, to cut this as short as may be, I made up my mind that the man I
wanted was a North German; that he had conceived a hideous passion for
Lucille before I knew her; that she had shrunk from it and him so
unmistakably, that he knew he had no chance; that my taking her away as
my wife, to which he might have been a witness, drove him to as hideous
a revenge; that, hearing we were going to England, and seeing that we
were likely to stop nowhere on the way, and so give him a chance of
doing what he had made up his mind to do, he had decided to do what he
had done as he had done it,--counting on finding us asleep as he had
found us, or on his strength if it came to a fight between him and me;
but coolly reckless enough to brave everything in any case. And the
devil aiding, he had in great part and only too well su