Then, as though it had been overdue and long awaited, the laugh checked and choked. It freed them from the thrall that held them. Regnault's head fell back.
"The amyl!" cried O'Neill, and they were all about him. "The amyl— where is it?"
Regnault's face was a mask of paralyzed pain; but the silver patch- box that held the capsules was not on the table. It took a minute to find it on the floor. O'Neill smashed a couple, and thrust his hand into the waxen face—and waited. Buscarlet was breathing like a man in a nightmare. Truelove stood to attention. But Regnault did not return to the shape of life.
O'Neill let his hand drop, and turned to Truelove. "He's got it," he said; "But fetch a doctor."
His eyes fell on the dancer in her shimmering scarlet, where she knelt at the bedside, with her head bowed to the counterpane and her hands clasped over it.
He sighed. He did not understand.
X
THE POOR IN HEART
It was his habit of an evening to play the flute; and he was playing it faithfully, with the score propped up against a pile of books on his table, when the noises from the street reached him, and interrupted his music. With the silver-dotted flute in his hand he moved to the window and put aside the curtains to look out.
The flute is the instrument of mild men; and Robert Lucas had mildness for a chief quality. At the age of thirty-five, in the high noon of his manhood, he showed to the world a friendly, unenterprising face, neatly bearded, and generally a little vacant. The accident that gave him a Russian mother was his main qualification for the post he now held—that of representative of a firm of leather manufacturers in the Russian town of Tambov. He spoke Russian, he knew leather, and he could ignore the smells of a tanyard; these facts entitled him to a livelihood.