"It is quite useless. He is not here."
"Then you have an idea where he has gone!"
She hesitated a moment.
"Yes," she answered.
He waited, but she ventured nothing further.
"I want you to feel," he said quietly, "that you may call upon me for anything you wish done. My time is my own—quite my own. I place it at your service."
She turned to study his face a moment. It was clean and earnest. It bade her trust. Yet to ask him to do what lay before her was to bring him, a stranger, into the heart of her family affairs. It was to involve her in an intimacy from which instinctively she shrank. But pressing her close was the realization of the imminent danger threatening the boy. This was no time for quibbling—no time for nice shadings of propriety. Even if this meant a sacrifice of something of herself, she must cling to the one spar that promised a chance for her brother's safety. As Donaldson's eyes met hers, she felt ashamed that she had hesitated even long enough for these thoughts to flash through her brain.
"The boy uses opium," she said without equivocation.
The bare naming of the drug rolled up the curtain before the whole tragedy which had been suggested by the portrait in the library; it explained every detail of this wild night except her presence here practically alone with the crazed young man. It accounted for her objection to waiting in the drugstore; it solved the mystery of her fear of the city shadows. Had he suspected this, he would no more have allowed her to go up those stairs alone than he would have permitted her to go unescorted into the cell of a madman.
"I 'm sorry for him," he murmured. "Then he has gone straight to Mott Street?"