If they did not stop at
Effry there would be no halt for forty minutes. Now was his time. He
waited a little till they had got up the speed. The line here ran
through miles and miles of fen country, more or less drained by dykes
and rivers, but still wild and desolate enough. Over this great flat
the storm was sweeping furiously--even drowning in its turmoil the
noise of the travelling train.
Very quietly he rose and climbed over the low partition which
separated his compartment from that in which the woman was. She was
seated in the corner, her head leaning back, so that the feeble light
from the lamp fell on it, and her eyes were closed. She was asleep.
He slid himself along the seat till he was opposite to her, then
paused to look at the fierce wicked face on which drink and paint and
years of evil-thinking and living had left their marks, and looking
shuddered. There was his bad genius, there was the creature who had
driven him from evil to evil and finally destroyed him. Had it not
been for her he might have been a good and respected man, and not what
he was now, a fraudulent ruined outcast. All his life seemed to flash
before his inner eye in those few seconds of contemplation, all the
long weary years of struggle, crime, and deceit.
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