At nine o’clock in the morning the train entered Marseilles Station. Quixtus came speedily up to Clementina as she stepped on to the platform, and offered his services. He trusted she had slept well and had a comfortable journey. “Didn’t sleep a wink,” said Clementina. “Did you?” Quixtus admitted broken slumbers. The strangeness of the adventure had kept him awake. “You’re looking ill this morning,” said Clementina, glancing at him sharply. “What’s the matter with you?” He seemed careworn, feverish, and an unnatural glitter had replaced the haunted look in his eyes. Clementina did not know how the approaching consummation of a deed of real wickedness terrified the mild and gentle-natured man. Hitherto his evil doings had been fantastic, repaired almost at once as if mechanically by the underlying instinct of generosity; his visions of sin had been fantastic, too, harmless, unpractical; but this sin of vengeance which he had intellectually conceived and fostered loomed great and terrible. So does the braggart who has sworn to eat up a lion alive, totter at the knees when he hears the lion’s roar. His night had been that of a soul on fire. “Something’s wrong. What is it?” asked Clementina. He answered vaguely. This summons had upset him. It had set him thinking, a tiring mental process. He remembered, said he, how Hammersley, when they were boys together, had called him to see a dying butterfly on a rose-bush. The yellow wings were still flapping languidly; then slower and slower; then strength gave out and they quivered in the last effort; and then the hold on the rose-bush relaxed and the butterfly fell to the earth—dead. “What does Monsieur wish done with the baggage?” asked the attendant porter, who had listened uncomprehendingly to the long and tragical tale. Quixtus passed his hand across his forehead and looked at the porter as if awakening out of a dream. “What you like,” said he. So forlorn and hag-ridden did he appear, that a wave of pity swept through Clementina. The deadly phrase of the judge in the Marrable trial occurred to her: “Such men as you ought not to be allowed to go about loose.” The mothering instinct more than her natural forcefulness, made her take charge of the situation. “The omnibus of the Hôtel du Louvre,” she said to the man, and taking Quixtus by the arm, she led him like a child out of the station.