The reaction from the finality of this scene drove Garford into a high fever. The shock to his nervous system, already under constant pressure, during the preceding weeks, had culminated in the outburst of that moment when he had held Bowden’s head in his hands and watched it go purple. For a week, the pulsation of his heart increased to such an alarming velocity, filling his lungs as fast as his gasping breathing could discharge the air, that the doctor, fearing for his life, had him conveyed to a hospital. It was here that Doctor Fortier, working behind the scenes of the consultation-room, had made his first attempt to have him placed in an asylum.

His wife’s brother had consistently remained in the background. He had seen him only at rare intervals, and always with a sensation of dislike which amounted to a physical antipathy. Between the sister and brother, each a daring climber, filled with the contempt of petty obstacles, there were queer, unspoken comprehensions. Doctor Fortier had branched into other fields beyond the narrow limits of his profession. His name had been associated with land-development schemes and promoting syndicates. He had prospered, grown wealthy, risked too much, been bankrupted, and had slowly wormed his way back along the speculative highway. He made no pretense at morality, disdaining, in the boldness of his nature, the cloak of hypocrisy that others assumed before the world. In the present case, he flung himself into the battle for his sister’s future without a restraining scruple.

Among the crowd of admirers who surrounded Louise Fortier was a certain direct and unworldly person, David Macklin, made rich into the millions by a casual freak of nature which stored treasures of oil beneath the tax-ridden farms of his ancestors. Louise Fortier, with the instinctive sense of defense of the woman even toward the undivined dangers of the future, had assumed toward this blunt and simple nature an attitude of grateful comradeship. She consulted him on trivial decisions; she assumed the frank intimacy of a privileged confidant, and she confided in him the burden of her imaginary woes. He had the self-made man’s contempt for conventionalities. When he fell in love with her, he thought of only one thing: carrying her off, breaking the chain that bound her, of a divorce that would make her free for him. She checked him, well pleased, satisfied for the present to have him in reserve. When she had seen the apparition of her husband, after the first cold fear for her own safety, even mingled with her terror had been the thought, “If I can only escape, there is still Macklin.” Hence her horror when she had perceived the full extent of Garford’s revenge and the ridicule which would fasten on her with a marriage to a social idler ten years her junior.

The crisis which faced her astute, practical mind left her under no illusions. She understood the society in which she moved, the enemies she had made, and the revenge they would attempt. With the gossip already clinging to her name, marriage to Bowden meant also social ostracism. In the catastrophe which threatened, she needed a cloak of at least twenty millions, for there are well-defined degrees in society’s tolerance. To save herself by Macklin she was ready for anything—any lie or any humiliation.

Doctor Fortier, consulted, had immediately evolved the daring plan of having the husband declared insane, a course not so difficult as it seemed, on account of the many known eccentricities of his character and the final disorder into which the discovery of his wife’s true character had thrown him.

A chance remark of one of the attending nurses, the mere dropping of Doctor Fortier’s name, had aroused Garford’s suspicions. He questioned adroitly and learned that his brother-in-law was of the hospital staff. Once on his guard, he noticed the constant surveillance over his actions, his words, habits, even to the silent moods of the day. He divined the pitfall and the danger not only to himself, but to his cherished scheme of revenge, suddenly calmed the fever of excitement, and ended the torturing nights of insomnia. To the surprise of every one, his pulse became normal again; he slept, and all signs of mental irritation vanished. Three days later, he walked out of the hospital, apparently cured.

The realization of the peril he had escaped left, however, a haunting memory, even an inner dread of the possibility of a mental breakdown. The shadow of Doctor Fortier seemed constantly close to him, spying on his movements with cynical exultant expectancy, biding the opportune moment. Two further attempts had been made to seize him by force, one at the bachelor apartment where he had taken up his residence and the second at his home, where he had been decoyed by an urgent message from his wife. Each attempt had failed—the first due to the accidental arrival of friends, the second to a warning which had arrived to him from some unknown source, from a servant, perhaps, to whom he had been kind. In the suspense in which he was living, he plunged into the oblivion of dissipation at a pace which only his extreme impulses could carry him, until his excesses had become notorious. His lawyers represented to him that such public outbursts could not fail but play into the hands of his enemies, who would be able to demand his commitment with every degree of plausibility. He then resolved to pursue his galloping way to destruction in some convenient hidden outpost of the city, and, seeking to hide his identity under the name of Dangerfield and to disappear completely, had come to Teagan’s Arcade. Despite the pleadings of his lawyers, he had insisted on the full quixotic program of flinging his fortune into the faces of those who had wronged him, knowing well that they would humiliate themselves to the point of accepting it in some convenient disguise. Also, he had come to hate the very idea of money, which had never come into his life but to disorganize it, which had so often dragged him from the inspired simplicity of his artist’s isolation into the disillusioning and fatiguing notoriety of the brilliant rushing world.

The suit for divorce had been forced on his wife by his threat to bring an action himself with all the consequent publicity of details. She recoiled before this and accepted the inevitable. As a matter of fact, she comprehended that a divorce was necessary; indeed, she had welcomed it in her new-found ambition to marry Macklin. She hoped that, with time, the determination of her husband would turn from the ultimatum he had delivered, particularly as she knew that his lawyers, in their effort to save the quixotic artist from robbing himself, were urging him to be satisfied with a divorce which would carry with it no financial imposition. When gradually she perceived the character of his obsessed resolution, she determined on a decisive step. Whatever the advice of her counsellors she had never, for a moment, the slightest doubt what he would do in case she dared to disobey him. This was the situation the night of the boxing party when the door had suddenly opened to Dangerfield upon the unwelcome figure of his wife.

The last visitor had crowded awkwardly out of the studio; the door had closed, and they remained standing, face to face. She turned, drew the bolt, flung back the heavy veil which protected her, and said gently:

“Put on your things first, Dan.”

“What do you want? Why do you come here?” he said frowning, lowering angrily at her, the clumsy gloves still on his hands, his body red and white under the glare of the top light.

“To throw myself on your mercy,” she said, dropping her hands in a hopeless surrender. “To do anything you want.”

“Anything but one,” he cut in.

“Anything but one,” she said, in a whisper, and her hands closed in tension at the slender throat.

The evil passion of revenge momentarily possessed him, at the thought that this woman who had so often mocked him in her heart as an easy dupe, had, at last, come here to taste the bitterness of humiliation herself, in order to escape the fate he had commanded. He wished to enjoy this reversal of the rÔles, and, in an ugly mood, turned his back on her, walked over to the couch, and flung himself into a sweater. She watched him, without moving, until he had returned and faced her, and, from the cruelty in his eyes and the smile over his lips, she comprehended how hopeless was her mission. An inspiration came to her. She said rapidly:

“Wait until you understand why I have come.”

“Why have you come?” he said, smiling, expectant of the lie.

She was able to shudder, counterfeiting a physical repulsion so finely that he was half-deceived.

“First, to tell you that I will not accept a cent of that money from you. I may be everything—but I am not—that!” she said, looking down to avoid his eyes. “You can make me marry Bowden, but, if you do, I shall never touch a cent of your money.”

“So you have made up your mind to marry him?”

“If you insist, I have no choice,” she said, without resistance.

He thought:

“H’m, this is the first stage.” Aloud, he said, “My dear Louise, if you do not marry him, you admit that you are a——” He hesitated, in his disgust before the word to characterize her action.

“I admit it all,” she said.

A flash of anger shook him at the thought. He said angrily:

“You may. I do not. I do not admit to you, to Bowden, or to the world that the woman who bears my name can be such a creature. That is the point.”

She sat down on the edge of a chair, checked at her first attempt, staring at the carpet, her lips compressed, her agile mind racing ahead, conscious of the cruel enjoyment with which he watched and waited.

“There is no use in going on,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “This interview is very painful to me.”

She made no answer, though her slender eyebrows came into a closer contraction which sent little furrows shooting over her forehead and brought drawn lines down to her lips. He did not insist. He was curious with the sense of some impending danger. Why had she come—the true, the final reason which would emerge at the end?

At this moment, she raised her eyes and fixed her glance on him in a long, penetrating stare.

“She has come to see if I am drinking myself to death.” The thought flashed over him. He smiled and said coldly: “Never fear—I shall hold out!”

Whatever the thought in her mind, she rose, glanced around the room, and her fingers closed over her throat as though overcome with emotion.

“It’s too frightful for words!” she said.

“What is?”

“What I have done,” she said, in a whisper. “To find you here in such a place.” She went to the window which gave over the roofs, raised the shade on that forlorn prospect, and pulled it down again with a shudder. Prepared as he was for duplicity, he did not, at that moment, suspect the motive of this reconnoitering. She came back, drawing her hand over her eyes.

“I deserve no mercy,” she said, staring away from him.

“But you have come here to get it,” he said cynically.

“Yes.”

“It is useless.”

“If I agree to the divorce—it is as good as granted—why do you insist on my marrying Bowden?”

“For the honor of my name,” he said angrily. “I do not deny you the right to love another; but I do not acknowledge that you can soil my honor by a vulgar deception. If I had believed otherwise that night, I should have killed you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Then kill me now.”

“Then what you were had still power to hurt me,” he said coldly.

She fell into silence again before this check to the outburst she had prepared. At the end, she said slowly:

“Is it to punish me or to cleanse your name?”

“To cleanse my name,” he said emphatically.

A ray of light appeared to her.

“You wish whatever I do in the future to be under another name but yours.”

“Precisely.”

“Very well; I am ready to marry immediately, in the forty-eight hours as you require—but not Bowden.”

He was caught unawares. He asked himself rapidly who it could be whom she had been able to dominate thus in her moment of peril, and, carried away by this curiosity, he said:

“Who is it?”

“Mr. David Macklin wishes to marry me the moment I am free.”

“Macklin!” he exclaimed, his astonishment so visibly naÏve that she was hard put to it to check a smile. “Well, that is a surprise.”

“Why?”

“I had not counted on Macklin,” he said cynically. “If he is another one, I knew nothing of it.”

“He has never been my lover—really—if that is what you mean,” she said quickly.

He looked at her, at this strange woman who had lived so many years by his side, and even as she in the scene of her confession had yielded him an involuntary tribute for his mastery of the scene, he felt an almost animal admiration for the genius of fascination in her which could achieve such a stroke in the moment of her humiliation.

“I wonder what story you could have told him,” he said, yielding frankly to this impulse.

“That is not the point,” she said indifferently. “But, first, I want you to know me as I am. Your detectives have told you much. It is nothing to the reality.”

“Is it possible there is more?” he said coldly.

“You shall judge; I shan’t withhold anything,” she said heavily, and lines of age and weariness came into her face as she doggedly came to her decision. “You will loathe me, but you will understand why I am as I am. I don’t ask you to take me back; I admit I cannot be true to any man.”

Deceived by his silence, counting on the gentleness and charity in his nature, seeking the dramatic appeal to his sympathies, perhaps with a wild hope that she might paint such a picture that he would turn from his revenge by the very revulsion of his loathing, she began a story of a distorted childhood, of a corrupt and venal home, a terrible, incomprehensible history which he, held though he was by the whispered tragic procession of ghoulish memories, did not entirely believe. The first leaden, sullen attitude continued in the mechanical, colorless recital. The tears, one by one, rose in her eyes and traveled slowly down her cheeks, without a note of suffering breaking into her voice. He listened, fascinated, incredulous, asking himself if human artifice could invent such a history.

“That was my childhood. The rest?—nothing else matters,” she said, with a shrug of her shoulder. “You know the rest—half of it. Could you expect anything else?” She took out her handkerchief—her voice had not risen—and carefully suppressed the tears gathered on her eyes. Then she extended her hands in a little movement of appeal.

“Well?”

There was a long, tense silence.

“What a monster!” he said at last.

She believed that she had won, that she had humbled herself so low in this hideous confession that she was now beneath his contempt. She flung herself at his feet, clinging to them, crying:

“Dan, Dan, let me go—let me go—don’t drag us both down!”

“Drag you down!” He burst into a wild laugh.

She rose, abruptly disillusioned, and looked at him as though she would spring at his throat.

“Keep on looking at me like that,” he said coldly. “Now we have the truth!”

“I swear—” she began vehemently.

“Don’t,” he cut in. “I don’t believe you, and if I did, a thousand times more reason why you should have played square with me.”

She knew that she had lost, even at the moment when in her self-admiration for the tour-de-force she had invented, she had felt that success must be hers. She saw a side of the man she had never suspected, the side which no woman perceives until she is on the point of losing the man who has lived at her side, and she said to herself: “I have underrated him.”

“Louise, I told you a lie,” he said. “I wish to punish you. That is the truth. I have that in me, too.” He felt the rapid mounting of his pulse, the inner raging excitement starting up, and he checked the cruel words which were on his tongue, afraid of where an outburst of passion would fling him, saying instead: “Are you through?”

She looked at him and began to laugh.

“That is better,” he said cynically.

“I did not lie to you,” she said abruptly.

“Perhaps not entirely.”

“You won’t change, then?”

He shook his head.

She drew a long breath, went over to the dressing-table and rearranged her hair which, at the moment when she had thrown herself at his feet, had become disarranged. She took her time, adjusting many little trifles, assuring herself that all trace of her emotion had disappeared. When she returned to where he had waited motionless, she said:

“I’m sorry. It’s all very foolish. You are ruining yourself.” He took up her coat and held it for her. “I shan’t trouble you again,” she continued. “It is final, isn’t it?”

He opened the door, aware of the hammering at his heart and the dangerous tension of all his nerves.

“Too late—I’ve said it—you’ve got just four days more.”

“I’ve been a fool. It is useless to ask you to forgive me. I do, though,” she said bitterly enough, yet to him the motion seemed counterfeit.

He laughed a scornful laugh.

“With all your cleverness you’re not clever enough. You should have known the man you’re dealing with.”

The next moment they were in the hall, and he perceived that they had been overheard.

The rest is known; her attempt to lure him downstairs to where Doctor Fortier and his aides were waiting (an attempt frustrated by the intuition of Inga and the interference of O’Leary); Dangerfield’s alarm at the menace he felt about him; his enforced abstinence, and the obsession that gradually took possesion of him that he was being watched, an obsession which was justified by the subsequent attempt which nearly succeeded in delivering him into the hands of Doctor Fortier. The constant thought of the outer danger raised up in his soul the fear of the inner thing, that something worse than death which, at times, in his physical weakness seemed to cry out in the hollow of his brain. When he had whispered to Inga the thing he feared, he had but hinted at the inner torment through which he was passing. To hold on to himself a little longer, to realize the vengeance he had determined was his sole engrossing thought, and then, one way or the other, to pull the numbing clouds of oblivion about his head and sink out of sight—a failure. For he had reached that utterly hopeless point in the life of a man of talent when he has seen everything, been everything, hoped everything, and come to utter disillusionment, too profound in artistic vision to trick himself into vain hopes, too keen in worldly knowledge not to perceive the tragedy of what might have been. Had the wreck of his home come before the surrender of his vision, he would have reacted, forgotten all in the return to untrammeled simplicity and dedication to work. The contrary was true, and, in the whole world, there was nothing to fall back on—no object, and no living person. With Inga, he felt strange actions and reactions. In her presence, the quiet, unquestioning devotion of her personality roused him sometimes to moments of vain regret. He had even said to himself that such a personality, absolutely devoted, demanding nothing but to serve him, unflinching in her loyalty, would have been the companion he craved and needed. He often thought bitterly that it was the final irony of fate that, in the end, in such an abandoned corner of the world, he should have found her—too late.

Yet he was not conscious of any feeling of love. She was still an unknown and uncharted land to him, to which at times the instinct of self-preservation blindly inclined him. Nor could he fathom the feeling that had sent her to his assistance. He was grateful, to the point that he would not for the world have left a bruising memory on her young life, and yet, at times, at the thought that in her silent watching, her unquestioning devotion, there lay a deep unfaltering determination to turn him aside from his fixed purpose, he felt a fierce revolt, an angry antagonism at her growing ascendency. This was the situation on the night when, mercifully confused in memory and perceptions, he had stumbled back into his studio, mocking at destiny, and found her waiting.