If she resented this a.s.sertion, she gave no sign of it, and he went on with the cool a.s.surance of a physician who is certain of his diagnosis.

"You may persuade yourself that you are in that business because you are interested in it or because you know that you have an unaccountable power. But you are doing it chiefly for the same reason that most of us ply our trades; because you want to make money."

"Well?" She commented, "It does supply me with a living, and you know there's a theory that we must live."

He laughed. "You don't have to live the way you do. There are much easier ways for you to accomplish that end. Have you got anybody dependent on you?"

"No, but I am horribly in debt." The admission seemed to slip from her without her permission, and when the words were out a little frown puckered her forehead. The eyes of her escort were fixed upon the ruby pendant, so obviously a genuine and costly stone. She toyed absently with it, putting a cruel strain upon its slender thread-like chain of gold. "Do you know," she said slowly, "I believe you would make a wonderful hypnotist. I believe that you could even hypnotize me."

The bold amber eyes gazed straight into hers. "But you told me, didn't you, that hypnotism had to be a cooperative measure? You said, I remember, that n.o.body could hypnotize anybody else unless--unless the victim were willing."

One of his hands closed over hers as it reached for the sugar-bowl. She made no effort to draw it away.

"Perhaps," she answered softly, "perhaps the victim _is_ willing."

He stacked up a little pile of the oval platters and pushed them impatiently to one side. "I guess we understand each other all right,"

he said. "You need me and I need you. We've each come to the place where we need help. Now let's not waste any more time about it. Let's get down to bra.s.s tacks."

CHAPTER XIII

It was seven o'clock on a rainy evening, and Kenwick turned up the collar of his coat as he left the St. Germaine. Inside the Hartshire Building there was a cheerful warmth that promised well for the evening.

He ignored the elevator and walked up the three flights of stairs to the floor where the photographer had his rooms. On the way, he tried to persuade himself that he was not doing this in order to gain time. But there was a good hour intervening between now and time to start for the theater, and at the end of that hour, he reflected Jarvis might not care to keep the engagement.

As he toiled upward Kenwick considered every possible detail of the scene that was before him, and then wearily discarded them all. "Why do I do it?" he challenged himself, as he reached the last landing. "How do I dare to do it? My G.o.d! I can't afford to do it; I've got to have one friend left!"

But as he had once told Jarvis, those scenes of life whose settings are scrupulously ordered usually lack dramatic climax. At the end of what he was pleased to characterize as his "confession," the photographer surveyed him with sympathetic but unastonished eyes.

"I'd begun to think that there might be something personal in it," he commented. "I could see that there was something lying heavy on your chest. It's a devilish mess, isn't it?"

The other man was looking at him with a disconcerting sharpness. But the thing for which he probed was not in Granville Jarvis's eyes.

"I seem to be such a helpless sort of brute," his host went on, and pushed a box of cigars across the table as though in an unconscious effort to make up with tobacco what he lacked in counsel. "I never can think of the right thing to do just on the spur of the minute.

Inspiration has an uncomfortable habit of failing to keep her engagements with me."

"I didn't expect any advice," Kenwick told him. "But it's a relief to tell you and get it off my mind; to tell you and yet not have you think that I ought to be locked up."

"Somebody ought to be locked up," Jarvis remarked grimly. "And it's your job to find that person. Why don't you go East?"

"I am going East. I've decided to go next week. It would be hard to make you understand why I haven't done it before, but----Well, this sort of an--illness does a terrible thing to a man's soul, Jarvis. It paralyzes his initiative. It gives him the most deadly thing in this world; the patience of despair. I'm constantly _waiting_ for things to clear up instead of going at them hammer and tongs."

His companion nodded. "I think I understand. It would be the h.e.l.l of a situation for you back there among people you've always known, and who presumably know all about you, and not being able to bridge the gap. I can see why you wanted to get a line on yourself first, and you're right, too. After all, a man owes something to his nervous system. But since you've decided to go and brave it out back there I think I'd let things rest the way they are till you go. Sometimes life works itself out better if we don't interfere too much. Somebody is bound to make a foolish play if you let them all manage their own hands."

"And yet somebody told me the other day, Jarvis, that I was too pa.s.sive in the crutches of fate; that I ought to be more combative, more aggressive."

Jarvis laughed. "I'd be willing to bet that it was a woman who told you that."

"Yes, a woman did tell me. It was that trance medium."

"I might have guessed it. By the way, I went to see her myself the other day. Your story got me interested. She ought to have paid you a liberal commission for that yarn. But I suppose she doesn't even know you wrote it. She struck me as being a mighty clever little woman. Well, it's after eight o'clock. Let's go."

They found their seats in the first row of the balcony. The house was brilliantly lighted and filling up rapidly. But although Jarvis had urged his companion to forget for a time the tangle in which he was enmeshed, it was he who returned to the theme while they sat waiting for the curtain to rise.

"The trouble is, there's a missing link in the chain somewhere. I don't mean an event, but a person. Somebody dealt those cards, of course, and whoever did it knows where the marked one is. The New York trip may be a wild goose chase after all. Did you ever think of hiring a detective to help you out?"

"Yes, I've thought of it a lot. But somehow I don't want to do it. I don't want to have anybody mixed up in my affairs as intimately as that. I can't explain my feeling about it. But there is so much noise about this sort of thing if it once rises to the surface, and if there's any graft connected with my name, I'd like to keep the scandal private.

Besides," he laughed with a tolerant self-indulgence, "I don't suppose the person lives, Jarvis, who doesn't believe that way down inside of him somewhere, sleeping but never dead, is the genius of the detective.

I've made a sort of a covenant with myself that I and no other shall run this thing to cover, and do it without kicking up a noise."

Jarvis was staring speculatively at the foot-lights. "It's one of the most curious cases I ever knew. I'll tell you what, Kenwick. You're the original 'Wise Man from Our Town.' Remember him?

"And when he found his eyes were out, With all his might and main, He jumped into the bramble-bush And scratched them back again."

"A dangerous experiment, I always thought," Kenwick remarked.

"So is dynamite, but sometimes we have to use it, and nothing else will take its place."

"Are you advising me to put a bomb under somebody on the chance that it might be the man who shuffled the deck?"

"No. I'm advising you to do the bramble-bush stunt. Don't jump forward; jump back."

"What do you mean?"

"Why, the more I think of it the more I believe that the solution of this mystery is to be found in the place where it began."

"But where did it begin?"

"So far as your knowledge of it extends, it began in the canon or ravine or whatever place it was that you had the accident. If I'm not mistaken, Kenwick, that place is your bramble-bush."

The curtain rose upon the first act and there was no opportunity for further conversation. It was during the intermission between the second and third acts that Jarvis, leaning over the balcony, said suddenly, "There's a friend of yours; fourth row on the right."

Kenwick made a cursory examination of the seats and shook his head.

"Don't see him. Don't see anybody I know here to-night except Aiken, our dramatic critic."

"This is a woman. Count seven seats over in the fourth row. Isn't that lady in the garnet-colored coat your Madame Rosalie?"

"You're right; it is."

"I thought I couldn't be mistaken. There's a certain air of distinction about that woman in spite of----" Jarvis stopped, for he saw that his companion was not listening. For a moment Kenwick sat there staring down at the fourth row like a man in a dream. Then he gripped Jarvis's arm.

"Look!" he cried. "Down there with Madame Rosalie."

"What's the matter? You're such an excitable cuss, Kenwick."

"That fellow who's with her. Look! Jarvis, _that's_ the man!"

"What man?"