from all the travellers in a train that one traveller whose arm had thrust the girl to her doom? A little cleverness and watchfulness on his part would render such identification impossible. A man provided with a railway key could get from one carriage to another easily enough, in the surprise and horror of the moments following upon the girl's fall. Few men are quite masters of their senses during such moments, and all eyes would be turned towards the gorge at the bottom of which the girl was lying; everybody's thought would be as to whether she was living or dead. Very easy in such a moment for an active man to pass from one carriage to the other, unobserved by any creature in or about the train.
Mr. Blümenlein's remark about the hidden door in the alcove had impressed Heathcote strongly: the door opening into a dark and obscure court, a narrow passage piercing from one street to another, and with only a side door here and there leading into a yard, and here and there the grated windows of a warehouse or an office; an alley in which, after business hours, there were hardly any signs of human habitation. Heathcote inspected this passage after he left the merchant's office. He followed it to its outlet into a narrow street, which led him into another and busier street parallel with the Rue Lafitte. A curious fancy possessed him; and he made his way, by narrow and obscure streets, behind the Grand Opéra and the Grand Hôtel, into the Rue Lafitte. By this way, which was somewhat circuitous, and which led for the most part through shabby streets, he avoided the Boulevard altogether.
That speech of Mr. Blümenlein's haunted him, like the refrain of a song. The words repeated themselves over and over again in his mind, with maddening reiteration.
"Wyllard, the speculator, was one man; but there was another man of whom the world knew nothing, and who went out and came in between dusk and dawn by that side door in the court."
It was a bold speculation on the part of the German merchant, and might have very little foundation in reality: yet the fact that such a side door had been made at Julian Wyllard's expense implied a desire for independent egress and ingress, a wish to be free from the espionage of porters and porters' wives, to go out and come in unobserved, to have no comment made upon the hours he kept.
For such a man as Wyllard had appeared in the eyes of the world, for a hard-headed plodder, a moneymaking machine, this easy access to the Boulevard and the pleasures of a Parisian midnight would have been useless.
But for a man who led a double life, who was the hard calculating man of business by day, and who at night took his revenge for the toil and dulness of the money-grubber's career
