"Well, and after you have found her and disposed of her?" asked Sommers.
"Oh, Ducharme will be all right then! He'll follow me like a lamb. He doesn't want to mess around with such. But she's got some power over him."
"Simply he wants to live with her and not with you."
The woman nodded her head sadly.
"I guess that's about it; but you see if she weren't around, he wouldn't know that he didn't love me."
Mrs. Ducharme wiped away her tears, and looked at the doctor in hopes that he might suggest some plan by which she could accomplish her end. To him she was but another case of a badly working mechanism. Either from the blow on her head or from hereditary influences she had a predisposition to a fixed idea. That tendency had cultivated this aberration about the woman her husband preferred to her. Should she happen on this woman in her wanderings about Chicago, there would be one of those blind newspaper tragedies,—a trial, and a term of years in prison. As he meditated on this an idea seized the doctor; there was a way to distract her.
"The best thing for you to do," he said severely, "is to go to work."
"Can't get no place," she replied despondently. "Have no references and can't keep a place. See a feller going up the street that looks like Ducharme, and I must go after him."
"I have a place in mind where you won't be likely to see many men that look like Ducharme!"
He explained to her the situation of the Ninety-first Street cottage, and what Mrs. Preston needed.