With that he went out, leaving me extremely perplexed and profoundly uncomfortable. Every one knows the trying effect of suspense on one’s nerves; and he had no doubt carefully calculated how it would act upon mine.
Did he mean to make his threat good, or was it a blank cartridge? I did not believe that the attempted abduction had been discovered, and that statement of his threw doubt on everything else. Moreover, he had told and acted lie after lie in the former interview, and had done so cleverly enough to hoodwink me completely.
He had declared on his honour that he was in earnest now, and his manner had been tremendously earnest. But a man who could lie as he had would probably not hold his word of honour much more highly than his word without such a pledge. So I put that aside as a mere touch of play-acting.
As I thought it all over, it seemed to me that he had overplayed his part. If he had meant to shoot me, that reference to his associates founded, as I believed it to be, on a lie about the plot having been discovered, was an unnecessary exaggeration of my danger, intended to appeal to my fears.
Yet, if I were wrong, my shrift was to be a very short one. To form a judgment on a man’s probable motives, when the penalty of a mistake means death, is a very ugly task, and I seemed to have scarcely begun to think when he came back.
I was still sitting on the bed and a glance at the paper showed him it was blank.
“You persist in refusing, then?”
“I haven’t had time to decide.”
“I won’t give you any longer,” he said, very sternly.
“There’s one point you must clear up. About Mademoiselle Dominguez,” I said firmly.