He moved a step nearer. "Yes ... but it is private."

The maid made a slight grimace and put her hand protectingly upon Mrs.

Hilmer's chair. Mrs. Hilmer shifted about impatiently.

"Never mind, Hilda," she snapped out. "I am not afraid."

The maid shrugged and departed.

"I have wanted to see her," Mrs. Hilmer went on, coldly. "But who could I send? ... Few people understand her life."

"Ah, then you have guessed?"

"Guessed? ... She has told me everything."

A shade of bitter malice crept into her face--the malice of a woman who has learned truths and is no longer shocked by them. Fred Starratt put his hat aside and he went up close to her.

"I lied to get in here," he said, quickly. "I am looking for Sylvia Molineaux myself."

"Why don't you try the streets, then?" she flung out, venomously.

He felt almost as if an insult had been hurled at _him_. He searched Mrs. Hilmer's face. Something more than physical pain had harrowed the woman before him to such deliberate mockery.

"You, too!" he cried. "How you must have suffered!"

She gave a little cackling laugh that made him shudder. "What about yourself?" she queried. "You do not look like a happy man."

"Would you be ... if ... Look at me closely, Mrs. Hilmer! Have you ever seen me before?"

He bent toward her. She took his face between her two clawlike fingers. Her eyes were points of greedy flame.

When she finally spoke her voice had almost a pensive quality to it.

"You might have been Fred Starratt, _once_," she said, evenly.

He rose to his feet.

"I knew you were not dead," he heard her saying. "And I don't think she felt sure, either... Ah, how I have worried her since that day!

Every morning I used to say: 'I dreamed of your husband last night. He was swimming out of a black pool ... a very black pool.'"

She chuckled at the memory of her sinister banter. So Helen Starratt did not have everything her own way! There were weapons which even weakness could flourish.

"Where has she gone?" he asked, suddenly.

"South, for a change... I've worried her sick with my black pool.

Whenever the doorbell would ring I would say as sweetly as I could, 'What if that should be your husband?' I drove her out with just that... You've come just the right time to help. It couldn't have been planned any better."

She might have been Storch, masquerading in skirts, as she sat there casting significantly narrow glances at him. He wondered why he had come. He felt like a fly struggling from the moist depths of a cream jug only to be thrust continually back by a ruthless force. Was everybody bent on plunging him into the ultimate despair? He moved back with a poignant gesture of escape.

"You mustn't count on me, Mrs. Hilmer!" he cried, desperately. "I'm nothing but a poor, spent man. I've lost the capacity for revenge."

She smiled maliciously. "You see me here--helpless. And yet, in all these months I've prayed for only one thing--to have strength enough one day to rise in this chair and throw myself upon them both... Oh, but I should like to kill them!... You talk about suffering ... but do you know what it is to feel the caress of hands that are waiting to lay hold of everything that was once yours?... I have six months more to live. The doctor told me yesterday... Six months more, getting weaker every day, until at last--"

She brought her hands up in a vigorous flourish, which died pitifully.

He felt a contempt for his impotence. He dropped into a seat opposite her.

"Tell me about it ... all ... from the beginning," he begged.

She opened the floodgates cautiously at first ... going back to the day when it had come upon her that she was a stranger in her own house. ... Hilmer's moral lapses had never affronted her. She knew men--or her father, to be exact, and his father before him. They were as G.o.d made them, no better and no worse. Perhaps she had never admitted it, but she would no doubt have felt a contempt for a man without the capacity for truant inconstancies. But she had her place from which it was inconceivable that she could be dislodged. ... On that day when she had realized that this position was threatened she had been put to one of two alternatives--open revolt or deceitful acceptance. She had chosen the latter. In the end her choice was justified, for she had begun to undermine Helen Starratt's content with subtle purring which dripped a steady pool of disquiet.

"She hasn't abandoned herself yet," she said, moving her claws restlessly. "She's too clever for that... She wants _my_ place.

Hilmer's like all men--he won't have a mistress for a wife... And she never would be any man's mistress while she saw a chance for the other thing ... she's too--"

She broke off suddenly, unable to find a word inclusive enough for all the contempt she wished to crowd into it. He was learning things. She could have ignored a frank courtesan with disdainful aloofness, but discreetly veiled wantonness made her articulate. When she mentioned Ginger her voice took a soft pity, mixed with certain condescension.

She was sympathetic, but there were still many things she could not understand.

"She used to come and pa.s.s me every morning," Mrs. Hilmer explained, "and your wife would look at her from head to foot. One day I said, 'Who is that woman?' ... 'How should I know?' she answered me. And I knew from her manner that she was lying. The next day I spoke deliberately. After that it was easy... She is a strange girl. She would come and read me such beautiful things and then go away to _that_! ... 'How is it possible for one woman to be so good and so bad?' I asked her once. And all she said was, 'How would you have us--all devil or all saint?' ... During all this your wife said nothing. When she _would_ see Sylvia Molineaux coming down the street she would wheel my chair into a quiet corner and walk calmly into the house... One day Sylvia Molineaux spoke of you. She told me the whole story and in the end she said: 'I don't come here altogether to be kind to you ... I come here to worry her. You cannot imagine how I hate her!' The next morning I said to Helen Starratt, 'Did you know that Sylvia Molineaux was a friend of your husband?' She had to answer me civilly. There was no other way out. But after that I said, whenever I could, 'Sylvia Molineaux tells me this,' or, 'Sylvia Molineaux tells me that.' And I would give her the tattle of Fairview... I know she could have strangled me, because she smiled too sweetly. But she made no protest, no comment. She merely walked into the house whenever Sylvia Molineaux appeared. But it worried her--yes, almost as much as that black pool from which I had you swimming every morning... And so it went on until the day after word had come that you had been drowned. I had not seen Sylvia for some days. She came down the street at the usual time. Helen was still up in her room ...

the maid had wheeled me out. She said nothing about what had happened.

But she looked very pale as she opened her book to read to me. In the midst of all this your wife came out and stood for a moment upon the landing. We looked up. She was in black. I gave one glance at Sylvia.

She closed her book with a bang and suddenly she was on her feet.

'Black! _Black_!' she cried out in a loud voice. 'How _can_ you!' Your wife grew pale and walked quickly back into the house. Sylvia's face was dreadful. 'I can't trust myself to come here again!' she said, turning on me fiercely. 'Fancy, _she_ can wear black. The hussy ...

the...' No, I shall not repeat what else she said... But when she had finished I caught her hand and I said: 'Come back and kill her! Come back and kill her, Sylvia Molineaux!' She gave a cry and left me. I have not seen her since."

He sat staring at the wasted figure before him. Who would have thought, seeing her in a happier day, that she could quiver with such red-fanged energy! After all, she was more primitive even than Ginger.

She was like some limpid, prattling stream swollen to sudden fury by a cloudburst of bitterness.

He was recalled from his scrutiny of the terrible figure before him by the sound of her voice, this time dropping into a monologue which held a half-musing quality. Hilmer was puzzling her a bit. She could not quite understand why a man accustomed to hew his way without restraint should be possessing his soul in such patience before Helen Starratt's provocative advances and discreet retreats. Either she was unable or unwilling to fathom the fascination which a subtle game sometimes held for a man schooled only in elemental approaches toward his goal. Was he enthralled or confused or merely curious? And how long would he continue to give his sufferance scope? How long would he pretend to play the moth to Helen Starratt's fitful flamings? Mrs. Hilmer, raising the question, answered it tentatively by a statement that held a curious mixture of hope and fear.

"Hilmer's going south himself next week... On business, he _says_."

She laughed harshly. "I wonder if they both think me quite a fool! ...

If he succeeds this time she's done for!"

Fred Starratt stirred in his seat.

"Don't deceive yourself," he found himself saying, coldly; "whatever else my wife is, she's no fool... Remember, she wrote me a letter every week. She looks over her cards before she plays them...A few months more or less don't--"

He broke off, suddenly amazed at his cruelty. Mrs. Hilmer's expression changed from arrested exultation to fretful appeal.

"I have only six months to live," she wailed. "If I could walk just for a day...an hour...five minutes!"

She covered her face in her hands.

"What do you expect _me_ to do?" he asked, helplessly, with a certain air of resignation.

She took her fingers from her eyes. A crafty smile illumined her features. "How should I know? ...What do men do in such cases?...She will be gone two weeks. I pray G.o.d she may never enter this house again. But that is in your hands."

He felt suddenly cold all over, as if she had delivered an enemy into his keeping. She still loved Axel Hilmer...loved him to the point of hatred. What she wished for was his head upon a charger. With other backgrounds and other circ.u.mstances crowding her to fury she would have danced for her boon like the daughter of Herodias. As it was, she sat like some pagan G.o.ddess, full of sinister silences, impotent, yet unconquered.

And again Storch's prophetic words swept him: