I am almost ashamed to write what followed. Not for the first time in my life--not for the first time in this enterprise--I acted as only one could act who was possessed by some spirit of mischief for his own undoing. Even to myself the impulse which comes over me at times to play the fool--to say or do at the critical moment the one word or thing which ought to be left unsaid or undone, is altogether unaccountable. This uncertainty of character, this tendency to lose my head and to bring tumbling about my ears, by the utterance of a word, the entire edifice which I have perhaps spent laborious months in building up, has been my stumbling-block through life, and must inevitably stand in the way of my ever becoming a good detective. But a good detective I have, as the reader knows, never claimed to be. Were it so, I should undoubtedly suppress the incident I am about to relate, for it tells very much against myself without in any way strengthening the probability of my story. When the man in hiding on the “Cuban Queen” lifted his head and looked me in the face, I knew at once that I was in the presence, if not of James Mullen, at all events of the person with whom I had travelled to Southend on the occasion when he had objected so forcibly to the striking of a fusee. The bright prominent eyes, beautiful as a woman’s, the delicately clear complexion, the straw-coloured hair, the aquiline nose with the strange upward arching of the nostrils, the curious knitting of the brows over the eyes, the full lips that spoke of voluptuousness unscrupulous and cruel, the firm, finely-moulded chin--all these there was no mistaking, in spite of his woman’s dress. As I looked at him the scene in the stuffy smoking carriage on the Southend railway came back to me, and when in his quick, incisive way he asked, “Well, sir, and what have you to say for yourself?” I stammered foolishly for a moment, and then, prompted by what spirit of perversity and mischief I know not, answered him by another question, which under the circumstances must have sounded like intentional insolence. “You’re the man wot couldn’t stand the smell of fusees?” Had horns suddenly sprouted out on each side of my head he could not have looked at me with more absolute amazement and dismay. For a very few seconds he stared wide-eyed with wonder, and then a look of comprehension and cunning crept into his eyes. They narrowed cat-like and cruel, the muscles about the cheeks tightened, the lips parted, showing the clenched teeth, I heard his breath coming and going like that of a winded runner, and the next second his face flamed out with a look of such devilish ferocity and uncontrollable fury as I pray God I may never see on face of man again.