"Let me tell you my case," she continued, turning in appeal to the rest of us, "the case of a poor girl in a small city near New York, who liked a good time, liked pretty clothes, a ride in an automobile, theatres, excitement, bright lights, night life. I liked them. He knew that. He led me on, made me like him. And when I began to show the strain of the pace—we all show it more than the men—he cast me aside, like a squeezed-out lemon."
Sybil Seymour was talking rapidly, but she was not hysterical.
"Already you know Betty Blackwell's story—part of it," she hurried on. "Miss Kendall has told me—how she was bribed to disappear. But beyond that—what?"
For a moment she paused. No one said a word. Here at last was the one person who held the key to the mystery.
"She did disappear. She kept her word. At last she had money, the one thing she had longed for. At last she was able to gratify those desires to play the fashionable lady which her family had always felt. What more natural, then, than while she must keep in hiding to make one visit to the beauty parlour to which so many society women went—Margot's? It was there that she went on the day that she disappeared."
We were hanging breathlessly now on the words of the girl as she untangled the sordid story.
"And then?" prompted Kennedy.
"Then came into play another arm of the System," she replied. "They tried to make sure that she would disappear. They tried the same arts on her that they had on me—this man and the gang about him. He played on her love of beauty and Madame Margot helped him. He used the Montmartre and the Futurist to fascinate her, but still she was not his. She let herself drift along, perhaps because she knew that her family was every bit the equal socially of his own. Madame Margot tried drugs; first the doped cigarette, then drugs that had to be forced on her. She kept her in that joint for days by force; and there where I went for relief day after day from my own bitter thoughts I saw her, in that hell which Miss Kendall now by her evidence will close forever. Still she would not yield.
"I saw it all. Maybe you will say I was jealous because I had lost him. I was not. I hated him. You do not know how close hate can be to love in the heart of a woman. I could not help it. I had to write a letter that might save her.
"Miss Kendall has told me about the typewritten letters; how you, Professor Kennedy, traced them to the Montmartre. I wrote them, I admit, for these people. I wrote that stuff about drugs for Dr. Harris. And I wrote the first letter of all to the District Attorney. I wrote it for myself and signed it as I am—God forgive me—'An Outcast.'"