‘You have just now described a man who was by when you heard that song; have you not?’

‘Yes!’ said Mr Baptist, nodding fifty times.

‘And was he not called Blandois?’

‘No!’ said Mr Baptist. ‘Altro, Altro, Altro, Altro!’ He could not reject the name sufficiently, with his head and his right forefinger going at once.

‘Stay!’ cried Clennam, spreading out the handbill on his desk. ‘Was this the man? You can understand what I read aloud?’

‘Altogether. Perfectly.’

‘But look at it, too. Come here and look over me, while I read.’

Mr Baptist approached, followed every word with his quick eyes, saw and heard it all out with the greatest impatience, then clapped his two hands flat upon the bill as if he had fiercely caught some noxious creature, and cried, looking eagerly at Clennam, ‘It is the man! Behold him!’

‘This is of far greater moment to me’ said Clennam, in great agitation, ‘than you can imagine. Tell me where you knew the man.’

Mr Baptist, releasing the paper very slowly and with much discomfiture, and drawing himself back two or three paces, and making as though he dusted his hands, returned, very much against his will:

‘At Marsiglia—Marseilles.’

‘What was he?’

‘A prisoner, and—Altro! I believe yes!—an,’ Mr Baptist crept closer again to whisper it, ‘Assassin!’

Clennam fell back as if the word had struck him a blow: so terrible did it make his mother’s communication with the man appear. Cavalletto dropped on one knee, and implored him, with a redundancy of gesticulation, to hear what had brought himself into such foul company.

He told with perfect truth how it had come of a little contraband trading, and how he had in time been released from prison, and how he had gone away from those antecedents. How, at the house of entertainment called the Break of Day at Chalons on the Saône, he had been awakened in his bed at night by the same assassin, then assuming the name of Lagnier, though his name had formerly been Rigaud; how the assassin had proposed that they should join their fortunes together; how he held the assassin in such dread and aversion that he had fled from him at daylight, and how he had ever since been haunted by the fear of seeing the assassin again and being claimed by him as an acquaintance. When he had related this, with an emphasis and poise on the word, ‘assassin,’ peculiarly belonging to his own language, and which did not serve to render it less terrible to Clennam, he suddenly sprang to his feet, pounced upon the bill again, and with a vehemence that would have been absolute madness in any man of Northern origin, cried ‘Behold the same assassin! Here he is!’

In his passionate raptures, he at first forgot the fact that he had lately seen the assassin in London. On his remembering it, it suggested hope to Clennam that the recognition might be of later date than the night of the visit at his mother’s; but Cavalletto was too exact and clear about time and place, to leave any opening for doubt that it had preceded that occasion.

‘Listen,’ said Arthur, very seriously. ‘This man, as we have read here, has wholly disappeared.’