Hastily Kennedy called Hazleton’s home, Butler, and one after another of Hazleton’s favorite clubs. It was not until noon that Butler himself found him and came with him, under protest, to the laboratory.
“What is it—what have you found?” cried Butler, his lean form a-quiver with suppressed excitement.
Briefly, one fact after another, sparing Hazleton nothing, Kennedy poured forth the story, how by hint and innuendo Maudsley had been working on Millicent, undermining her, little knowing that he had attacked in her a very tower of strength, how Veronica, infatuated by him, had infatuated him, had led him on step by step.
Pale and agitated, with nerves unstrung by the life he had been leading, Hazleton listened. And as Kennedy hammered one fact after another home, he clenched his fists until the nails dug into his very palms.
“The scoundrels,” he ground out, as Kennedy finished by painting the picture of the brave little broken-hearted woman fighting off she knew not what, and the golden-haired, innocent baby stretching out his arms in glee at the very chance to prove that he was what he was. “The scoundrels—take me to Maudsley now. I must see Maudsley. Quick!”
As we pulled up before the door of the reconstructed stable-studio, Kennedy jumped out. The door was unlocked. Up the broad flight of stairs, Hazleton went two at a time. We followed him closely.
Lying on the divan in the room that had been the scene of so many orgies, locked in each other’s arms, were two figures—Veronica Haversham and Dr. Maudsley.
She must have gone there directly after our visit to Dr. Klemm’s, must have been waiting for him when he returned with his story of the exposure to answer her fears of us as Mrs. Hazleton’s detectives. In a frenzy of intoxication she must have flung her arms blindly about him in a last wild embrace.
Hazleton looked, aghast.
He leaned over and took her arm. Before he could frame the name, “Veronica!” he had recoiled.