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“How can I tell this?… The blade flashed and fell…. There was the sound of a heavy sigh stifled under a heavy hand….

“Then the huge form of the assassin was reared erect, and the bloated yellow face seemed to laugh silently, while the hand that held the steel pointed at the sleeping man in diabolical menace.

“And so the huge form and the bloated yellow face seemed to fade away while I watched.

“The express rushed and roared through the blinding darkness without; the sleeping man slept on still; till suddenly a strong light fell full upon him, and he woke.

“And then I saw why I had been so certain that I knew him. For as he lifted his head, I saw his face in the strong light.

“And the face was my own face; and the sleeper was myself!”

Paul Devereux made a pause in his queer story here. Except when he had spoken of the girl, he had spoken in his usual cool, hard way. The pipe he had been smoking all the time was smoked out. He took time to fill another before he went on. I said never a word, for I guessed who the sleeping girl was.

“Well,” Paul remarked presently, “that was a devilish queer dream, wasn’t it? You’ll account for it by telling me I’d been so pestered with the story of the banker’s murder that I naturally had nightmare; perhaps, too, that my digestion was out of order. Call it a nightmare, call it dyspepsia, if you like. I don’t, because—- But you’ll see why I don’t directly.

“At the same moment that my dream-self awoke in my dream, my actual self woke in reality, and with the same ghastly horror.

“I say the same horror, for neither then nor afterward could I separate my one self from my other self. They seemed identical; so that this queer dream made a more lasting impression upon me than you’d think. However, in the life I led that sort of thing couldn’t last very long. Before I came back from Africa I had utterly forgotten all about it. Before I left Paris, though, and while it was quite fresh in my memory, I sketched the big murderer just as I had seen him in my dream. The great yellow face, the great broad frame in the fur travelling-robe, the great hand with the great evil eye upon it–everything, carefully and minutely, as though I had been going to paint a portrait that I wanted to make lifelike. I think at the time I had some such intention. If I had, I never fulfilled it. But I made the sketch, as I say, carefully; and then I forgot all about it.

“Time passed–three years nearly. I was wintering in the south of France that year. There it was that I met her–Lucille. Old D’Avray, her father, and I had met before in Algeria. He was dying now. He left the child on his death-bed to me. 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.