She had been fond of him certainly a good many years, but in women of her disposition a wound to self-esteem is the death of affection. Their love is rooted in their vanity, and you cannot offend the latter without killing that which springs from it. At times she wished that he were there that she could make him murder William Massarene; but then murder was unknown in her world, and she could not have told him what made her wish the brute stuck in the throat like a Pyrenean boar; and so things were best as they were. Poor Harry; if he had remained in England, he would only have been an additional complication. He would have seen, as this horrible brute saw, that shame and disgust and terror were ageing her fast and painfully. CHAPTER XXX. One afternoon there landed from an American liner, at a Liverpool wharf, a tall, bony, haggard-looking man, roughly and shabbily dressed, with a long, tangled, grey beard, and dark, wide-open, wistful eyes; he had lost his left arm. He had been a steerage passenger of the poorest class, and had been moody and silent on the voyage, giving no offence, but making no friends or acquaintances, and saying nothing of whence he came or of whither he was bound; others talked of the little village they were going to return to, of the old parents who were longing to welcome them, of the graves left behind them or the health and youth lost for ever, of their cheated hopes and broken fortunes or their modest gains and longed-for rest; but he said nothing whatever; he had interested no one as he had offended no one; no one noticed or cared where he went when he landed. He did not stop to eat or drink, but took his third-class ticket for London, and when that was paid had only two dollars remaining in his pocket as his share of the goods of this earth. He was wedged up between rough navvies in an overfilled compartment, and had a slow, tedious, uncomfortable journey in the parliamentary train. But he did not heed these minor troubles; his mind was engrossed in one overwhelming, all-engrossing thought which sat on his breast and gnawed at his vitals like a vampire. “I guess I’ll find him soon, even in that great city, if he’s as big a man as they say,” he muttered to himself as he got out of the train and passed into the mirk and noise and hurry of the London streets. He looked at his little bit of money, hesitated, walked through several streets, then entered a modest eating-house, which proclaimed its calling by eggs and cheese and rounds of beef ticketed with their prices in the window. He ordered a cup of coffee and a fried rasher of bacon, and when he had drunken and eaten these paid his small reckoning and said to the person who had served him: “Can you tell me where a rich man called William Massarene, who came over from the States some years ago, lives in this city of yours?”