He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence. The thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the seashore, as indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him. The sound of exploding bombs was lost in their immensity of passive grains without an echo. For instance, this Verloc affair. Who thought of it now? Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled a much-folded newspaper out of his pocket. The Professor raised his head at the rustle. `What's that paper? Anything in it?' he asked.

Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.

`Nothing. Nothing whatever. The thing's ten days old. I forgot it in my pocket, I suppose.'

But he did not throw the old thing away. Before returning it to his pocket he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph. They ran thus: `An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.'

Such were the end words of an item of news headed:

`Suicide of Lady Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat.' Comrade Ossipon was familiar with the beauties of its journalistic style. `An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang forever... 'He knew every word by heart. `An impenetrable mystery... `And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his breast, fell into a long reverie.

He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence. He could not issue forth to meet his various conquests, those that he courted on benches in Kensington Gardens, and those he met near area railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an impenetrable mystery destined... He was becoming scientifically afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. `To hang for ever over.' It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the need of his self-love, and put some material means into his hand He needed it to live. It was there. But if he could no longer make use of it, he ran the risk of starving his ideals and his body... `This act of madness or despair.'

`An impenetrable mystery' was sure `to hang for ever' as far as all mankind was concerned. But what of that if he alone of all men could never get rid of the cursed knowledge? And Comrade Ossipon's knowledge was as precise as the newspaper man could make it - up to the very threshold of the `mystery destined to hang forever... '.

Comrade Ossipon was well informed. He knew what the gangway man of the steamer had seen: `A lady in a black dress and a black veil, wandering at midnight alongside on the quay. `Are you going by the boat, ma'am,' he had asked her, encouragingly. `This way.' She seemed not to know what to do. He helped her on board. She seemed weak.'

And Ossipon knew also what the stewardess had seen: a lady in black with a white face standing in the middle of the empty ladies' cabin. The stewardess induced her to lie down there. The lady seemed quite unwilling to speak, and as if she were in some awful trouble. The next the stewardess knew she was gone from the ladies' cabin. The stewardess then went on deck to look for her, and Comrade Ossipon was informed that the good woman found the unhappy lady lying down in one of the hooded seats. Her eyes were open, but she would not answer anything that was said to her. She seemed very ill. The stewardess fetched the chief steward, and those two people stood by the side of the hooded seat consulting over their extraordinary and tragic passenger. They talked in audible whispers (for she seemed past hearing) of St Malo and the Consul there, of communicating with her people in England. Then they went away to arrange for her removal down below, for indeed by what they could see of her face she seemed to them to be dying. But Comrade Ossipon knew that behind that white mask of despair there was struggling against terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a love of life that could resist the furious anguish which drives to murder and the fear, the blind, mad fear of the gallows. He knew. But the stewardess