“At least, you must think that I am right,” she cried, appealingly. “You are a man, and you would feel like that. I am sure of it. Isn’t it natural that I should want justice? He was all I had in the world.”
“He is dead,” Bruce Deville said, gently. “Nothing can bring him back to life. Besides——”
He hesitated. The girl leaned forward, listening intently.
“Besides what?”
“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you,” he said, slowly, “that if a man hated your brother so much as to follow him down here and kill him, that so great a hatred must have sprung from some great cause? I know nothing, of course, of your brother’s life, or of the manner of his life. But men do not strike one another without provocation. They do not kill one another without very great provocation.”
“I see what you mean,” she said, slowly. “You mean that my brother must first have been the sinner.”
“I am not taking that for granted,” he said, hastily; “only one cannot help thinking sometimes that it might have been so.”
“He was my brother,” she said, simply. “He was all that I had in the world. My desire for justice may be selfish. Yet I hate the man who killed him, and I want to see him punished. I do not believe that any sin of his could ever have deserved so terrible a retribution.”
“Perhaps not,” he said; “yet there is so little that you can do. To search for any one by the name of Maltabar around here you have proved a hopeless task; and that is your only clue, is it not?”
“I am sending,” she said, “for a London detective. I shall remain here until he arrives, at any rate.”