"You need have no fear," she said. "I've no desire now to—harm him. The—reason is gone. This has cured me. I feel as if I could never bear to see him again. Oh, hurry! Please, hurry! I want to get away from here." Ste. Marie nodded and went out of the room.
CHAPTER XII
THE NAME OF THE LADY WITH THE EYES:
EVIDENCE HEAPS UP SWIFTLY
Ste. Marie drove home to the Rue d'Assas with his head in a whirl and with a sense of great excitement beating somewhere within him, probably in the place where his heart ought to be. He had a curiously sure feeling that at last his feet were upon the right path. He could not have explained this to himself—indeed, there was nothing to explain, and if there had been, he was in far too great an inner turmoil to manage it. It was a mere feeling—the sort of thing which he had once tried to express to Captain Stewart, and had got laughed at for his pains.
There was, in sober fact, no reason whatever why Captain Stewart's possession of a photograph of the beautiful lady whom Ste. Marie had once seen in company with O'Hara should be taken as significant of anything except an appreciation of beauty on the part of Miss Benham's uncle—not even if, as Mlle. Nilssen believed, Captain Stewart was in love with the lady. But to Ste. Marie, in his whirl of reawakened excitement, the discovery loomed to the skies, and, in a series of ingenious but very vague leaps of the imagination, he saw himself, with the aid of this new evidence (which was no evidence at all, if he had been calm enough to realise it), victorious in his great quest, leading young Arthur Benham back to the arms of an ecstatic family, and kneeling at the feet of that youth's sister to claim his reward. All of which seems a rather startling flight of the imagination to have had its beginning in the sight of one photograph of a young woman. But then Ste. Marie was imaginative if he was anything.
He fell to thinking of this girl whose eyes, after one sight of them, had so long haunted him. He thought of her between those two men, the hard-faced Irish adventurer and the other, Stewart, strange compound of intellectual and voluptuary, and his eyes flashed in the dark and he gripped his hands together upon his knees. He said again—
"I won't believe it! I won't believe it!" Believe what? one wonders.
He slept hardly at all, only, towards morning, falling into an uneasy doze. And in the doze he dreamed once more the dream of the dim waste place and the hill, and the eyes and voice that called him back—because they needed him.
As early as he dared, after his morning coffee, he took a fiacre and drove across the river to the Boulevard de la Madeleine, where he climbed a certain stair, at the foot of which were two glass cases containing photographs of, for the most part, well-known ladies of the Parisian stage. At the top of the stair he entered the reception-room of a young photographer, who is famous now the world over, but who at the beginning of his career, when he had nothing but talent and no acquaintance, owed certain of his most important commissions to M. Ste. Marie.
The man, whose name was Bernstein, came forward eagerly from the studio beyond to greet his visitor, and Ste. Marie complimented him chaffingly upon his very sleek and prosperous appearance, and upon the new decorations of the little salon, which were, in truth, excellently well judged. But after they had talked for a little while of such matters he said—