Dillon had never lost his interest in the dancer and her husband. They attracted him. In their lives ran the same strain of madness, the madness of the furies, as in his own. Their lovable qualities were not few. Occasionally he dropped in to tease Edith over her lack of conscience, or her failures, and to discuss the cause of freedom with the smooth and flinty Curran. Wild humans have the charm of their wilderness. One must not forget their teeth and their claws. This night the two men sat alone. Curran filled the glasses and passed the cigars. Arthur made no comment on the absence of Edith. He might have been aware that the curtains within three feet of his chair, hiding the room beyond, concealed the two women, whose eyes, peering through small glasses fixed in the curtains, studied his face. He might even have guessed that his easy chair had been so placed as to let the light fall upon him while Curran sat in the dim light beyond. The young man gave no sign, spoke freely with Curran on the business of the night, and acted as usual.
"Of course it must be stopped at once," he said. "Very much flattered of course that I should be taken for Horace Endicott ... you gave away Tom Jones' name at last ... but these things, so trifling to you, jar the nerves of women. Then it would never do for me, with my little career in California unexplained, to have stories of a double identity ... is that what you call it?... running around. Of course I know it's that devil Edith, presuming always on good nature ... that's her nature ... but if you don't stop it, why I must."
"You'll have to do it, I think," the detective replied maliciously. "I can do only what she orders. I had to satisfy her by running to the priest, and your mother, and the Senator——"
"What! even my poor uncle! Oh, Curran!"
"The whole town, for that matter, Mr. Dillon. It was done in such a way, of course, that none of them suspected anything wrong, and we talked under promise of secrecy. I saw that the thing had to be done to satisfy her and to bring you down on us. Now you're down and the trouble's over as far as I am concerned."
"And Tom Jones was Horace Endicott," Arthur mused, "I knew it of course all along, but I respected your confidence. I had known Endicott."
"You knew Horace Endicott?" said Curran, horrified by a sudden vision of his own stupidity.
"And his lady, a lovely, a superb creature, but just a shade too sharp for her husband, don't you know. He was a fool in love, wasn't he? judging from your story of him. Has she become reconciled to her small income, I wonder? She was not that kind, but when one has to, that's the end of it. And there are consolations. How the past month has tired me. I could go to sleep right in the chair, only I want to settle this matter to-night, and I must say a kind word to the little devil——"
His voice faded away, and he slept, quite overpowered by the drug placed in his wine. After perfect silence for a minute, Curran beckoned to the women, who came noiseless into the room, and bent over the sleeping face. In his contempt for them, the detective neither spoke nor left his seat. Harpies brooding over the dead! Even he knew that!
Arthur's face lay in profile, its lines all visible, owing to the strong light, through the disguise of the beard. The melancholy which marks the face of any sleeper, a foreshadow of the eternal sleep, had become on this sleeper's countenance a profound sadness. From his seat Curran could see the pitiful droop of the mouth, the hollowness of the eyes, the shadows under the cheek-bones; marks of a sadness too deep for tears. Sonia took his face in her soft hands and turned the right profile to the light. She looked at the full face, smoothed his hair as if trying to recall an ancient memory.