Something had spoken in him. There was a voice, subtle and exultant, that reared itself phantom-like amid his thoughts. It was urging him to enter the locked door, to fall at the feet of the woman inside the room.
“Ah,” he mused, “she lures me. I believe her guilty ... a murderess, a Messalina. And the fact lures me. De Medicis hail her. De Medici ghosts inside me prostrate themselves devoutly before a kinswoman—a woman whose hands are red with murder.... An impulse toward obeisance stirs in me.”
He shuddered at his thoughts. His head was beginning to ache. He walked to a guest-room and turned on the light. Then he remembered something.
“I found a purse in the room ... in the chair.”
He grinned tiredly at himself in a dressing mirror.
“I must watch this duality in me,” he murmured. “She is guilty—yes, things whisper it inside me.... I know this because I feel drawn to her ... to her guilt. A kinswoman for the prowling ones in me....”
He studied his face in the mirror with a shiver. De Medici looked back at him.... Narrow, inscrutable eyes regarded him.
“Not my eyes,” he whispered.
His hands had withdrawn the purse. An ornate thing of an obsolete style. He opened it. The lining was torn inside. Folded in the bottom was a theater program. He studied it.... A program of “Iris,” played at the Goldsmith Theater in London in 1899 ... a repertoire company.
He replaced the dried paper carefully and closed the purse. In the lower right-hand corner of the leather were two initials in silver—F. B.