should, the result would be a permanent engagement
on the illustrated newspaper, to which I
was now only occasionally attached.

I received my instructions and packed up for
the journey the next day. On leaving Laura
once more (under what changed circumstances!)
in her sister's care, a serious consideration
recurred to me, which had more than once crossed
my wife's mind, as well as my own, already—I
mean tbe consideration of Marian's future. Had
we any right to let our selfish affection accept
the devotion of all that generous life? Was it
not our duty, our best expression of gratitude,
to forget ourselves, and to think only of her?
I tried to say this, when we were alone for a
moment, before I went away. She took my
hand, and silenced me, at the first words.

"After all that we three have suffered together,"
she said, " there can be no parting
between us, till the last parting of all. My heart
and my happiness, Walter, are with Laura and
you. Wait a little till there are children's voices
at your fireside. I will teach them to speak for
me, in their language; and the first lesson they
say to their father and mother shall be—We
can't spare our aunt!"

My journey to Paris was not undertaken
alone. At the eleventh hour, Pesca decided
that he would accompany me. He had not
recovered his customary cheerfulness, since the
night at the Opera; and he determined to try
what a week's holiday would do to raise his
spirits.

I performed the errand entrusted to me, and
drew out the necessary report, on the fourth
day from our arrival in Paris. The fifth day, I
arranged to devote to sight-seeing and amusement
in Pesca's company.

Our hotel had been too full to accommodate
us both on the same floor. My room was on
the second story, and Pesca's was above me, on
the third. On the morning of the fifth day, I
went up-stairs to see if the Professor was ready
to go out. Just before I reached the landing, I
saw his door opened from the inside; a long,
delicate, nervous hand (not my friend's hand
certainly) held it ajar. At the same time, I
heard Pesca's voice saying eagerly, in low tones,
and in his own language: "I remember the
name, but I don't know the man. You saw
at the Opera, he was so changed that I
could not recognise him. I will forward the
report—I can do no more." "No more need
be done," answered a second voice. The door
opened wide; and the light-haired man with
the scar on his cheek—the man I had seen following
Count Fosco's cab a week before—came out.
He bowed, as I drew aside to let him pass—his
face was fearfully pale—and he held fast by
the banisters, as he descended the stairs.

I pushed open the door, and entered Pesca's
room. He was crouched up, in the strangest
manner, in a corner of the sofa. He seemed to
shrink from himself—to shrink from me, when I
approached him.

"Am I disturbing you?" I asked. "I did
not know you had a friend with you till I saw
him come out."

"No friend," said Pesca, eagerly. "I see
him to day for the first time, and the last."

"I am afraid he has brought you bad news?"

"Horrible news, Walter! Let us go back to
London—I don't want to stop here—I am sorry
I ever came. The misfortunes of my youth
are very hard upon me," he said, turning his
face to the wall; "very hard upon me, in my
later time. I try to forget them—and they will
not forget me!"

"We can't return, I am afraid, before the
afternoon," I replied. "Would you like to
come out with me, in the mean time?"

"No, my friend; I will wait here. But let
us go back to-day—pray let us go back."

I left him, with the assurance that he should
leave Paris that afternoon. We had arranged,
the evening before, to ascend the Cathedral of
Notre-Dame, with Victor Hugo's noble romance
for our guide. There was nothing in the French
capital that I was more anxious to see—and I
departed, by myself, for the church.

Approaching Notre-Dame by the river-side, I
passed, on my way, the terrible dead-house of
Paris—the Morgue. A great crowd clamoured
and heaved round the door. There was evidently
something inside which excited the popular
curiosity, and fed the popular appetite for
horror.

I should have walked on to the church, if the
conversation of two men and a woman on the
outskirts of the crowd had not caught my ear.
They had just come out from seeing the sight
in the Morgue; and the account they were giving
of the dead body to their neighbours, described
it as the corpse of a man—a man of immense
size, with a strange mark on his left arm.

The moment those words reached me, I stopped,
and took my place with the crowd going
in. Some dim foreshadowing of the truth had
crossed my mind, when I heard Pesca's voice
through the open door, and when I saw the
stranger's face as he passed me on the stairs of
the hotel. Now, the truth itself was revealed
to me—revealed, in the chance words that had
just reached my ears. Other vengeance than mine
had followed that fated man from the theatre
to his own door; from his own door to his
refuge in Paris. Other vengeance than mine
had called him to the day of reckoning,
and had exacted from him the penalty of his
life. The moment when I had pointed him out
to Pesca, at the theatre, in the hearing of that
stranger by our side, who was looking for him,
too—was the moment that sealed his doom. I
remembered the struggle in my own heart, when
he and I stood face to face—the struggle before
I could let him escape me—and shuddered as I
recalled it.

Slowly, inch by inch, I pressed in with the
crowd, moving nearer and nearer to the great
glass screen that parts the dead from the living
at the Morgue—nearer and nearer, till I was
close behind the front row of spectators, and
could look in.