as a rule. But, as I say, I had a queer
dream once; and queer because it came literally true three years
afterward."

"Queer indeed, Paul."

"Happens to be true. What's queerer still, my dream was the means of my
finding a man I owed a long score, and a heavy one, and of my paying him
in full."

"Bad for the payee!" I thought.

Paul's face had grown terribly eloquent as he spoke those last words. On
a sudden the expression of it changed--another memory was stirring in
him. Wonderfully tender the fierce eyes grew; wonderfully tender the
faint, sad smile, that was like sunshine on storm-scathed granite. That
smile transfigured the man before me.

"Ah, poor child--poor Lucille!" I heard him mutter.

That was it, was it? So I let him be. Presently he lifted his head. If
he had let himself get the least thing out of hand for a moment, he had
got back his self-mastery the next.

"I'll tell you that queer story, Bertie, if you like," he said.

The proposition was flatteringly unusual, but the voice was quite his
own.

"Somehow I'd sooner talk than think about--_her_," he went on after a
pause.

I nodded. He might talk about this, you see, but _I_ couldn't. He began
with a question--an odd one:

"Did you ever hear I'd been married?"

Paul Devereux and a wife had always seemed and been to me a most
unheard-of conjunction. So I laconically said:

"No."

"Well, I was once, years ago. She was my wife--that child--for a week.
And then----"

I easily filled up the pause; but, as it happened, I filled it up
wrongly; for he added:

"And then she was murdered."

I was not unused to our Paul's stony style of talk; but this last
sentence was sufficiently startling.

"Eh?"

"Murdered--in her sleep. They never found the man who did it either,
though I had Durbec and all the Rue de Jerusalem at work. But I forgave
them that, for I found the man myself, and killed him."

He was filling his pipe again as he told me this, and he perhaps rammed
the Cavendish in a little tighter, but that was all. The thing was a
matter of course; I knew my Paul, well enough to know that. Of course he
killed him.

"Mind you," he continued, kindling the black _brule-gueule_ the
while--"mind you, I'd never seen this man before, never known of his
existence, except in a way that--however, it was this way."

He let his grizzled head drop back on the cushions of his chair, and his
eyes seemed to see the queer story he was telling enact