The colonel helped her from the car and a sweet-faced young girl came and put her arms about her and kissed her, as Mrs. Pennington had done at the station. In a dazed sort of way Shannon understood that they were telling her the girl’s name—that she was a daughter of the Penningtons. The girl accompanied the visitor to the rooms she was to occupy.
Shannon wished to be alone—she wanted to get at the black case in the traveling bag. Why didn’t the girl go away? She wanted to take her by the shoulders and throw her out of the room; yet outwardly she was calm and self-possessed.
Very carefully she turned toward the girl. It required a supreme effort not to tremble, and to keep her voice from rising to a scream.
“Please,” she said, “I should like to be alone.”
“I understand,” said the girl, and left the room, closing the door behind her.
Shannon crept stealthily to the door and turned the key in the lock. Then she wheeled and almost fell upon the traveling bag in her eagerness to get the small black case within it. She was trembling from head to foot, her eyes were wide and staring, and she mumbled to herself as she prepared the white powder and drew the liquid into the syringe.
Momentarily, however, she gathered herself together. For a few seconds she stood looking at the glass and metal instrument in her fingers—beyond it she saw her mother’s face.
“I don’t want to do it,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to do it, mother!” Her lower lip quivered, and tears came. “My God, I can’t help it!” Almost viciously she plunged the needle beneath her skin. “I didn’t want to do it to-day, of all days, with you lying over there all alone—dead!”
She threw herself across the bed and broke into uncontrolled sobbing; but her nerves were relaxed, and the expression of her grief was normal. Finally she sobbed herself to sleep, for she had not slept at all the night before.
It was afternoon when she awoke, and again she felt the craving for a narcotic. This time she did not fight it. She had lost the battle—why renew it? She bathed and dressed and took another shot before leaving her rooms—a guest suite on the second floor. She descended the stairs, which opened directly into the patio, and almost ran against a tall, broad-shouldered young man in flannel shirt and riding breeches, with boots and spurs. He stepped quickly back.