The names, the words, the meaning of them all, beat on his brain like blows of a hammer.
“Leilah! My wife! In Paris! Engaged!”
Again he looked at the sheet. “What a damned lie!” he ragingly cried, and, rumpling the paper, threw it from him.
But now, the names, the words, the meaning of them all, well beaten into him, readjusted themselves, presenting a picture perfectly defined and possibly real.
He stooped, gathered the paper, smoothed it, read the account again.
After all, he reflected, it might be that she was in Paris and, if there, it was natural that she would be with Violet Silverstairs. These two items were, therefore, not improbably correct. That view reached, the deduction followed: If they are correct, the other may be. Yet, in that case, he argued, obviously she must think me dead. On the heels of this second deduction an impression trod—the ease and dispatch with which she had become consoled.
Enraged at once, angered already by what he had taken for a lie and then infuriated by what he took for truth, the anterior incidents that had this supreme outrage for climax, leaped at him. At the onslaught the primitive passions flared, and it was with the impulse of the homicide that he determined to seek and overwhelm this woman who accepted men and matters with such entire sans-gêne.
On the morrow he left for New York. Before going he sent a cablegram to the address which the paper had supplied:
Am just apprised of the studied insult of your engagement to some foreign cad. Leaving for Paris at once.