He tried to realise the thoughts of the lonely old woman, dying in penury, leaving her orphan grandchild to face the world without a friend. She would go over the list of those whom she had known in the past—those who were rich enough to be generous. Alas! how few there are who remain the friends of poverty! One man she had known of, although she had never seen him—rich, generous to lavishness. She had at one time believed him to be the murderer of her daughter. But it might be that she had afterwards modified her opinion, that she had received some communication from this Georges, that he had assured her of his innocence, that he had sent her money, had helped her to struggle on against adverse times, had helped her for a while, and then grown weary. And she, knowing the place of his exile, had, in her desperation, determined upon committing her grandchild to this man's care; rather than to the pitiless world of strange faces and careless hearts, the outside world, to which one helpless girl the more is but as one drop in the ocean of sorrowing humanity. She had sent Léonie Lemarque to meet this man, and the girl had recognised the murderer of her aunt.
And yet this could hardly be, since the cabman's evidence showed that Léonie had been on the best possible terms with the person in whose company she drove to Paddington Station.
After that speech of his, Edward Heathcote had no longer the power to withhold any details of his investigation from Julian Wyllard and his wife. He told them in fewest words all that he had discovered since he crossed the Channel.
Dora was intensely interested in the story. The passionate love and passionate jealousy were very human feelings that appealed to her womanly tenderness. She could not withhold her pity from the murderer.
"Strange that, in all your Parisian experience, you never met this Monsieur Georges," she said to her husband.
"Hardly, since I seldom went out in the evening; while this man was evidently a thorough Bohemian, who only began to live after midnight," answered Wyllard.
He was sitting in a thoughtful attitude, his elbow on the table, his chin leaning on his hand, and that photograph of Marie Prévol lying before him. He was looking intently at it, perusing every lineament.
Presently he raised his eyes, slowly, thoughtfully, from the photograph to the face of his wife.
"Yes," said Heathcote, "I know what you are thinking. There is a likeness. It struck me this evening when I came into this room. There is a curious likeness between the face of the living and the dead."
That morning, on studying the countenance in the photograph, Heathcote had been perplexed—worried, even—by a
