“He professed a profound interest in the great work,” she continued presently, “and was indeed not a little forward in contributing to it. He attached himself to us, accompanied us everywhere, and quickly made himself indispensable to my father, who regarded his skill and courage with something approaching infatuation. There was no rock so high, no swamp so perilous, but Mr Wyllie would dare it in pursuit of valuable specimens. He seemed endowed with a demoniac energy, to possess a charmed life. He was wonderful, I admit; but there was always something about him that repelled me, that made me conscious of an instinctive antipathy in his presence. My dear father would habitually, when possible, revive and release the drugged insects after finishing with them; Mr Wyllie, on the contrary, would strip off their beautiful wings with a savage zest, or crush them between his coarse fingers into glittering meal. He was a dangerous man, and he always carried about with him, pinned into the inside crown of his flat-topped felt hat, a dried specimen of the moth called the Death’s Head. It was his piratical emblem, he would declare; and indeed it was a suitable one. Judge, then, of my horror and disgust, when I came to realize, as I did, that his pursuit all this time was not of my father’s interests, but of my father’s unhappy child!” Her fair head drooped, and she spoke in a lower voice. “I will not dwell upon the details of my discovery, but will hasten to the conclusion. Unthwarted by my declared aversion, confident in my father’s sympathy, this man made no secret, after his first avowal and repulse, of his intention to possess me. My father was blind to my misery and deaf to my protestations. The other held him in complete moral subjugation. I was at this time grown to be a woman, and of an age to assert myself. I was forming some wild scheme of escape, when the blow fell that for a while deprived me of my reason. One day my father, having rashly climbed a cliff-side in pursuit of a specimen, slipped, and was hurled lifeless at my very feet. The shock threw me into a cataleptic trance, from which I did not recover for several weeks. “That occurred in Switzerland, in the Zermatt valley, and when I awoke to my senses it was to find myself lying in a little hospice at St Niklaus which latterly we had been making our headquarters, and Mr Wyllie assuming the sole charge of my fortune and destinies.