Scarcely had Dolores hung up the receiver, scarcely had given her mind to the realization that John Cabot was trying to protect her from whatever it was that threatened, when the gallery door opened and Clarke Shayle strode into the room.
He looked flushed, hurried, perturbed. He stopped before Jack’s reading chair, in which she sat, and fixed his odd-flecked gaze upon her, his lips twitching. Sinking on the hassock, he laid his face in the robe that wrapped her knees and drew a rasping, relieved sigh.
“I was a fool to credit a word of it,” he exclaimed brokenly. “You really are sick. You really are—are everything I believed. I don’t care what she says or what anybody says. I wouldn’t care even if they could prove it. What a man thinks himself is the only thing that matters. And I’ve got a sort of super-think.” His attempt to banish emotion from his face with a grin was more ghastly than gay. “You see, it ain’t inherited. It’s a gift.”
Even in this crisis, he could not express himself without the use of his banal phrases. Dolores felt sorry for him. She stretched out her hand from an impulse to smooth back his stiff, auburn cowlick; then, remembering, drew it back.
“What ‘she’ and what ‘anybody’ says?” she asked.
“She sent for me this morning and told me all about last night. I believe she had the whole thing planned from first sight of you. She’s the only wholly bad woman I’ve ever known—Catherine.” He shaded his eyes as if confused by her shocked glance, then continued: “She loves herself and hates everyone who does not share the feeling, chiefly her husband. Because he has humiliated her by getting her number right, she intends to humiliate him before their world. She’s going to marry d’Elie after she gets all she wants out of Cabot and gets it her own way. As for me——”
His face lowered into his freckled, delicate hands. A shudder moved his thick neck and muscular back.
“God knows, I deserve the part she’s cast me for. But I pray Him—I pray you to let me off. My self-respect was only doped. It came to the day I met you and has made me so unhappy since that I—I hope—— Oh, have a heart, little chump! Help me to be honest with you—encourage me to explain.”
“Why? Why not?” She hesitated.
“Why? Because I owe it to you to make you understand. Why not? Because you have made me despise myself and my life. Here in your presence, at the present moment, I’d rather die than go on. And yet, I’ll worse than die if I don’t go on. Dolores, you have felt something of my power—you know that I’m mesmeric and hypnotic. You know that I know it, but not that I have used it to make me what I am to-day.” He gave a limping laugh. “Can’t you imagine what is my professional stock-in-trade—how I hold Catherine and her sort in scented boudoirs?”