“Dear Hugo—­I know all; and to know all is to forgive all.”

He grasped my hand once more.  “Know all!” he cried, with a despairing gesture.  “Oh, no; no one knows all but myself; not even the children.  But the children know much; they will forgive me.  Lina knows something; she will forgive me.  You know a little; you forgive me.  The world can never know.  It will brand my darlings as a murderer’s children.”

“It was the act of a minute,” I interposed.  “And—­though she is dead, poor lady, and one must speak no ill of her—­we can at least gather dimly, for your children’s sake, how deep was the provocation.”

He gazed at me fixedly.  His voice was like lead.  “For the children’s sake—­yes,” he answered, as in a dream.  “It was all for the children!  I have killed her—­murdered her—­she has paid her penalty; and, poor dead soul, I will utter no word against her—­the woman I have murdered!  But one thing I will say:  If omniscient justice sends me for this to eternal punishment, I can endure it gladly, like a man, knowing that so I have redeemed my Marian’s motherless girls from a deadly tyranny.”

It was the only sentence in which he ever alluded to her.

I sat down by his side and watched him closely.  Mechanically, methodically, he went on with his dressing.  The more he dressed, the less could I believe it was Hugo.  I had expected to find him close-shaven; so did the police, by their printed notices.  Instead of that, he had shaved his beard and whiskers, but only trimmed his moustache; trimmed it quite short, so as to reveal the boyish corners of the mouth—­a trick which entirely altered his rugged expression.  But that was not all; what puzzled me most was the eyes—­they were not Hugo’s.  At first I could not imagine why.  By degrees the truth dawned upon me.  His eyebrows were naturally thick and shaggy—­great overhanging growth, interspersed with many of those stiff long hairs to which Darwin called attention in certain men as surviving traits from a monkey-like ancestor.  In order to disguise himself, Hugo had pulled out all these coarser hairs, leaving nothing on his brows but the soft and closely pressed coat of down which underlies the longer bristles in all such cases.  This had wholly altered the expression of the eyes, which no longer looked out keenly from their cavernous penthouse; but being deprived of their relief, had acquired a much more ordinary and less individual aspect.  From a good-natured but shaggy giant, my old friend was transformed by his shaving and his costume into a well-fed and well-grown, but not very colossal, commercial gentleman.  Hugo was scarcely six feet high, indeed, though by his broad shoulders and bushy beard he had always impressed one with such a sense of size; and now that the hirsuteness had been got rid of, and the dress altered, he hardly struck one as taller or bigger than the average of his fellows.