On the whole, I realised that the head, large and powerful as it was, had qualities that might make for the highest intelligence and ambition, but now the face seemed weighed down with anxiety and grief of mind, and in its present expression there was just a touch of remorse, or was it some hidden consciousness of guilt? Keen observers who have lived much in solitude, and have not been perplexed by the sight of too many strange, eager, and passionate faces, say that every human being's countenance resembles in some degree some animal's. I tried to apply this rough-and-ready method of mental measurement to the Spaniard, fettered as I was by the fact that those two great glowing eyes of his, like twin black lamps that flashed so often with suppressed fire, were closed, and could not, therefore, give me any clue. Somehow I caught the impression of a panther, forest bred, highly strung, but held in leash by some strong sentiment: was it love for Camille Velasquon? All the warnings I had had against this man, the impassioned appeal Doris had made to me when she released me from the hunchback's, the hot scorn poured on my championship by old Zouche himself--the man's father, be it remembered--even Fotheringay's appeal to me to cease my association with him, lest worse befall me--all these things started up to bear witness against him. These had no reference to the tragic sequence of events--concrete things that had followed my engagement to him and had culminated in this mystery in Whitehall Court with the cruel slaying of an unnamed official of the Foreign Office by some secret brotherhood, which, as likely as not, might be the very order of St Bruno, to whose headquarters I was hastening without a thought of my own safety or freedom. Could I, therefore, trust him? Was I discreet to rely on him when great stakes, not only mine but England's, hung in the balance? On and on sped the train through hamlet, village and township. The twilight faded slowly into night, and as the gas lamps above my head flamed coarsely upward a terrible temptation assailed me and kept knocking on the doors of my brain in form something like this: 1. Why be a merely passive instrument in this great struggle between nations and persons for this Lake of Sacred Treasure? 2. Casteno stole the documents from the hunchback as he lay in the tent at Worcester senseless; why don't you take them from Casteno now he is senseless? Then you would be quite certain England would get her just rights. 3. You need not fear what the Spaniard might say or do to you if he caught you in the act. After all, you have got those clever imitations of the real thing which the hunchback and Paul Zouche prepared, and at a pinch you could substitute for the true manuscripts the false, and get clear away from St Bruno's to the protection of the Foreign Office before the fraud were discovered.