His black eyes were drawn to hers, and, momentarily, she thought she saw the soul of another man—another who was not Acey Smith. But the softened light in them as quickly changed to a hardened glint.
“No, no,” he said harshly, “that man can never be. I am fighting him off—have been fighting him since—” His gaze swerved from hers as his jaw clicked the balance: “—since you came. His advent now—would mean disaster. I found him too late.”
Anything she might have added was negatived by his changed attitude, a field of reserve, of isolation, he threw around himself at will. “With your permission,” he urged, “we will drop the personal topic with which I have been egotistically monopolising your time. You intimated at our last meeting that you had finally decided to tell me why it was so essential you should meet J.C.X.”
“Oh, yes,” she admitted. “I think I told you there was a very personal matter concerned outside of the unexplained reason for the head of the North Star Company asking me to come here. It was this: A man known as J.C.X. knew something of the affairs of my grandfather, Joseph Stone, a mining prospector, who lived and died in this north country somewhere.”
“Then you knew of the existence of J.C.X. before you received his letter?”
“Yes, through the rather vague statements about J.C.X., the North Star Company and my grandfather made in a field hospital during the great war by a Canadian named Captain Carlstone while in a delirium caused by shell-shock.”
“Yes?” If there was a shock of surprise in this disclosure, Acey Smith’s features did not register it.
“The rest was all conjecture,” Josephine Stone went on. “But let me first tell you the story of Captain Carlstone. When you have heard it you will be the better able to understand my curiosity in the matter.”
II
“It is not a long story,” she began. “The military career of Captain Carlstone was meteoric—he flashed into the thick of things from nobody knew where and disappeared in the fog of war as mysteriously.