As half-past five struck in the living-room, where he was seated, he concluded that the other plan had become inevitable. He had hoped it might be avoided. But the girl he now had to deal with was no longer the ignorant, impressionable child he had so easily moulded to his fancy.
There were two matters which preoccupied this man: the first, a genuine passion for the girl-wife he had been forced to abandon. Whatever this sentiment was,—love or a lesser impulse,—it had been born the moment he lost her; and it had painfully persisted through those prison months.
The second matter which absorbed him was hatred for the man who had sent him to a second term in prison. The charge was forgery; the firm of Smull, Shill & Co. procured his arrest.
On these two matters his mind had remained fixed until the poignancy of brooding became intolerable; and he sought relief in prison-smuggled drugs. Which, so far, was the history of Eddie Carter, addict, and penman par excellence.
Now, hunched up in an arm-chair in her living-room, he studied the immediate problem of Eris, picking eternally at the upholstery with scarred fingers, or at his clothing, his face, his own finger-nails—the skin around the base of the nails raw from long habit of self-mutilation.
His first plan of enlisting the girl’s sympathy had proven hopeless. There remained the alternate plan.
Six o’clock sounded from the mantel-clock. He got up and went to the pantry, where was a telephone extension for servants. With some difficulty and delay he got the person he was calling:
“Say, Abe, it’s Eddie. I’ve done what you said for me to do——”
“I didn’t tell you to do anything!” interrupted his lawyer, angrily. “Get next to yourself or I quit right now! D’you get that, you cheap dumbbell?”