He lifted his hat with the inborn grace of a high-born gentleman.  I coloured and bowed.  The train steamed out of the station.  As it went, I fell back, half fainting, in the comfortable armchair of the Pullman car, hardly able to speak with surprise and horror.  It was all so strange, so puzzling, so bewildering!  Then I owed my escape from the stenographic myrmidons of the Canadian Press to the polite care and attention of my father’s murderer!

Major Tascherel was a friend, he said, of Dr. Ivor’s!

Then Dr. Ivor knew I had come.  He knew I was going to Palmyra to find him.  And yet he had written to Quebec, apparently, expecting this crush, and asking his friend the Chief Constable to protect and befriend me.  Had he murdered my father, and was he in love with me still?  Did he think I’d come out, not to track him down, but to look for him?  Strange, horrible questions!  My heart stood still within me at this extraordinary revelation.  Yet I was so frightened at the moment, alone in a strange land, that I felt almost grateful to the murderer himself for his kindness in thinking of me and providing for my reception.

As I settled in my seat and had time to realise what these things meant, it dawned upon me by degrees that all this was less remarkable, after all, than I first thought it.  For they had telegraphed from England that I sailed on the Sarmatian; and Dr. Ivor, like everybody else, must have read the telegram.  He might naturally conclude I would be half-mobbed by reporters; and as it was clear he had once been fond of me—­hateful as I felt it even to admit the fact to myself—­he might really have desired to save me annoyance and trouble.  It was degrading, to be sure, even to think I owed anything of any sort to such a wretch as that murderer; yet in a certain corner of my heart I couldn’t help being thankful to him.  But how strange to feel I had come there on purpose to hunt him down!  How horrible that I must so repay good with evil!

Then a still more ghastly thought surged up suddenly in my mind.  Why on earth did he think I was going to Palmyra?  Was it possible he fancied I loved him still—­that I wanted to marry him?  Could he imagine I’d come out just to fling myself at his feet and ask him to take me?  Could he suppose I’d forgotten all the rest of my past life, and his vile act as well, and yet remembered alone what little love, if any, I ever had borne him?  It was incredible that any man, however wicked, however conceited, should think such folly as that—­that a girl would marry her father’s murderer; and yet what might not one expect from a man who, after having shot my father, had still the inconceivable and unbelievable audacity to take deliberate steps for securing my own comfort and happiness?  From such a wretch as that, one might look for almost anything!