"I have other company. You will have to be patient. At five."
The connection was shut off. He rose angrily, unaccustomed to any check to his immediate impulses. At the steps a boy came skipping down for the toll he had forgotten. He paid the exact amount, contrary to his custom, and drove his body back into the cushioned seat.
"Where to, sir?" said Harkness, turning.
"Anywhere," he answered gruffly, and, thwarted in his desire, he said to himself furiously: "That woman always opposes me! I must teach her a lesson. I won't go at all."
But at the end of a moment he pulled out his watch impatiently and calculated the time.
"Home," he said suddenly.
At the house, he ran rapidly through the opening doors and up the stairs to his bedroom, where he unlocked a little safe fixed in the wall behind a tapestry that hid it, and took out a tray of rings. Sorting them quickly, with a low, cynical chuckle, he selected a magnificent ruby, slipped it into his pocket, closed the safe, and passed out of the house with the same rapidity with which he had entered.
"Mrs. Kildair's, Harkness," he said. "Drive so as to get me there at five-fifteen."
"Now we shall see," he said to himself, with a smile, gazing at the ring in the palm of his hand with a man's contemptuous contemplation of the stone which could hold such fascination over a woman's soul. For him it was absolutely necessary, as a first step toward his conquest of all his enemies, to feel his power over this one present resistance.
The idea that had come into his head restored his good humor and aroused in him a certain joy of energy. He had forgot momentarily his errand, absorbed in his own battle for existence.