“I would rather stay here with Leila, alone with her——” Storm murmured mendaciously. “I won’t touch her, Doctor; let me stay!”
“No.” The physician transferred the key to the outside of the door and locked it decisively as he spoke. “It wouldn’t do you any good, Storm. You’ve got to brace up. You have put this affair in my hands now, and I order you to pull yourself together. Get upstairs and take a cold shower and then I’ll give you a sedative.”
With a last glance at the closed door, Storm stumbled to the stairs and mounted, lurching against the banisters as though overcome by weakness; but in reality his brain was seething with the thought of the danger yet ahead.
He closed the door of his room softly behind him, and then paused. What if Carr’s sympathetic, friendly manner had been assumed to cloak a suspicion of the truth? The physician had seemed to accept his theory, but he had not committed himself. Suppose he were following, tiptoeing up the stairs now to peer in at the keyhole——!
The thought was madness, yet Storm turned instinctively. The key of his door had been mislaid long ago and never replaced, but a heavy lounging robe hung from a peg on the center panel. Catching a fold of it he drew it back over the door-knob so that it trailed before the lock like a curtain, thick and impenetrable. His bathroom had no entrance leading to the hall, and the only other door—that opening on Leila’s dressing-room was protected by a cretonne portière.
He realized that he had no need for secrecy, there was nothing to be done now which all the world might not safely see—and yet an insane desire came to him to conceal himself from all eyes. He must have a moment of respite from the rôle he was playing, a moment of peace and calmness to gird himself anew for what the immediate future might hold.
Did Carr accept the situation at its face value? The man whom in the night he had half-scornfully dismissed from his mind as a simple country practitioner now appeared in a vastly different light. For the moment he held in his hands Storm’s immunity from suspicion, and the latter’s disquietude increased.
There was his step upon the stair! What would his face reveal?
With a quick revulsion of feeling, Storm sprang to the door and opened it.
The smile with which the benign physician greeted him removed all lingering doubt.