Kent shook his head. “Thank you; but I don’t believe I’d better. When I’m at work on a case I need privacy.”
“And so you stick to a public hotel! Queer notions you have of privacy.”
“Not at all. A hotel is absolutely mine to do with as I please, as long as I pay my bills. I’m among strangers; I’m not interfered with. No house, not even a man’s own, can possibly be so private as a strange hotel.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” admitted the other, with a laugh; then, lapsing into pronounced gloom for the first time, he said, “It seems pretty tough that I should be in all this coil and tangle because a crazy woman happened by merest chance to make a call on me.”
Kent’s pipe glowed in the darkness and silence before he replied. Then he delivered himself as follows: “Sedgwick”—puff—“try”—puff—“to forget if you can”—puff—puff—“that stuff about the crazy woman”—puff—puff—puff.
“Forget it? How should I? Why should I?”
“Because”—puff—“you’re absolutely on the”—puff—puff—“wrong track. Good night.”
Slowly Kent climbed the road to the crest of the hill; then stopped and looked back into the studio, which had sprung into light as soon as he left. Sedgwick’s figure loomed, tall and spare, in the radiance. The artist was standing before his easel, looking down at it fixedly. Kent knew what it was that he gazed on, and as the lovely wistful girl-face rose in his memory he sighed, a little.
“I mustn’t forget that quest,” he said. “Poor old Sedgwick!”
But, once in his room, the picture faded, and there came before his groping mental vision instead the spectacle of two dark figures, chained together and battling, the one for life, the other for some mysterious elusive motive that fluttered at the portals of his comprehension like a half-remembered melody. And the second struggling figure, whose face was hidden, flashed in the moonlight with the sheen of silver stars against black.