"Was Colonel Hargraves down there alone?" His voice was thick, hoarse.
"Where?" returned Pemmican, as if he had misunderstood.
"At Gravesend?"
Pemmican looked long and quizzically into Challoner's eyes.
"He was ... not," was his simple but significant answer, and moved away.
But Challoner followed him up, and seizing his arm, said somewhat gruffly:—
"Look here, Pemmican, if Hargraves comes in—I want to see him—tell him to wait for me."
For the first time Pemmican's eyes lost their curious tiredness, an enigmatical smile played about the corners of his mouth.
"Yes," he said simply, and nodding, went his way.
Left alone, Challoner found himself a prey to all the black fiends of rage, jealousy and desire for revenge. For a time everything was blotted out from his vision except the face of Letty Love and the face of Colonel Hargraves. "This small world," he muttered to himself, "is much too small for me and Colonel Hargraves!" With that there loomed up out of the mists of his mind the brilliantly lighted and ornate entrance of a certain apartment-house a short distance away; and a few minutes later, obedient to his subconscious will, his feet carried him down the stairs to a door evidently leading to the outside. A few words of explanation from Challoner to the man on duty there were necessary before he would proceed to undo the complicated system of bolts; and then he passed out and was under the starry skies. Challoner was not the first man of social prominence in the community that could directly trace the beginning of his life as an outcast to passing through that door!