The monosyllable came like a pistol-shot, incisive, compelling! There was a breathless silence. Trowse continued, and his words were cold and hard.
"Do not threaten me," he said. "You should know better than that. You should know exactly of how much account I hold my life when it comes to a question of adding to the sum of human knowledge. I shall do as I say. My decision is unalterable."
Powers was a man again.
"It is well to be prepared," he said. "I thank you for your warning. Take mine in return. I have as little fear of death as you, and I think that my love for Eleanor is a passion as strong as your devotion to science. I tell you that I will not have her made the subject of your experiments. I will not have her life or reason imperiled, even to solve the greatest of all mysteries."
Trowse shrugged his shoulders.
"I think," he said, "that we understand one another perfectly."
Their talk fanned a growing distrust of Trowse that Fiske had felt for weeks. He knew the man's hypnotic power, he saw the fascination with which his friend haunted Eleanor's side at gatherings where her clear bright laugh would suddenly cease and a look almost of terror creep into her eyes with Trowse's entrance. Then she forgot every one else and yielded herself to his spell.
Very subtly, very deftly, Trowse pursued his cold-blooded course of experiment while Powers in vain sought to end it. At last he forbade Trowse to enter his home and all went well until returning one day, at an unexpected hour, Powers heard from his library ringing through the house, through closed doors and curtained hallways, the cry of a woman in mortal fear.
He sprang to the door and threw it open. Outside all was silent. There was no repetition of the cry. Then a fainter sound reached him—a low, convulsive moaning as of some creature in pain. He crossed the hall, ran wildly down a long passage, and flung open the door of the little sitting-room which had been given to Eleanor for her own. With his foot upon the threshold he paused for a second. He heard stealthy movements in the hall, the front door softly opened and shut. On the floor before him, white and motionless, Eleanor was lying.
He knew that this was Trowse's work; he ran to the front door with murder in his heart but there was no sight of anyone. Marian, too, from the drawing room had heard the door close softly.