ed was, it
appeared, because Madame Steinmetz had conceived all at once a jealous
dislike to her. How far this was owing to Lucille herself I could well
understand; but I could understand Madame's jealousy equally well.
Madame's illness, strangely sudden, dated from the cessation of
Lucille's visits. Was it hard to find a _cause_ for that illness--a
cause for the wife's subsequent suspected death? I thought not. Then had
followed Lucille's departure from Paris. The child's anxiety for her
father hid her _other fear_ from his eyes and mine; but that fear must
have been on her then. With us she forgot it in time; yet it or another
reason had always prevented all mention of what had occasioned it. She
became my wife. At that very time I easily ascertained that Steinmetz
was absent from Paris; less easily, but indubitably, that he had, at all
events, been as far south as Lyons. At Lyons it must have been that
Lucille first discovered he was dogging us. Hence her alarm, which I had
remembered, and her anxiety to proceed on our journey without stopping
for the night, as I had previously arranged. The morning after the
murder Steinmetz reappeared in Paris. From the hour at which he was seen
at the _gare_, it was certain that he had travelled by the night express
train in which Lucille and I had started from Lyons; and he wore that
morning a travelling-coat of fur in all respects similar to the one I
remembered so well.

"If I had ever had any doubt of my man after actually seeing him, I
should probably have convinced myself that he was my man by the general
tendency of these facts, which I got at slowly and one by one. But I had
no need of such evidence; and of course no case, even with such
evidence, for a court of law. However, courts of law I had never
intended to trouble in the matter.

"The opportunity I was waiting was some time before it offered. Monsieur
Steinmetz was a man of regular habits, I found--from his first-floor in
the street off the Champs Elysees, every morning at eleven, to the
Bourse; thence to his bureau hard by till four; from his bureau to his
cafe, where he read papers and played dominoes till six; and then home
slowly by the Boulevarts. He might consider himself tolerably safe from
me while he led this sort of life, even supposing he was aware he was
incurring any danger. I don't think he troubled much about that; till
one night, when, over the count of the beloved domino-points, his eyes
met mine