“Oh, Lucy—Lucy!” she cried, almost before the door had closed behind Mareno. “I am desperate—desperate!” Sir Lucien placed a chair for her. His face looked very drawn and grim. But Rita was in too highly strung a condition to observe this fact, or indeed to observe anything. “Tell me,” he said gently. And in a torrent of disconnected, barely coherent language, the tortured woman told him of Kazmah’s attempt to force her to lure Quentin Gray into the drug coterie. Sir Lucien stood behind her chair, and the icy reserve which habitually rendered his face an impenetrable mask deserted him as the story of Rita’s treatment at the hands of the Egyptian of Bond Street was unfolded in all its sordid hideousness. Rita’s soft, musical voice, for which of old she had been famous, shook and wavered; her pose, her twitching gestures, all told of a nervous agony bordering on prostration or worse. Finally: “He dare not refuse you!” she cried. “Ring him up and insist upon him seeing me tonight!” “_I_ will see him, Rita.” She turned to him, wild-eyed. “You shall not! You shall not!” she said. “I am going to speak to that man face to face, and if he is human he must listen to me. Oh! I have realized the hold he has upon me, Lucy! I know what it means, this disappearance of all the others who used to sell what Kazmah sells. If I am to suffer, _he_ shall not escape! I swear it. Either he listens to me tonight or I go straight to the police!” “Be calm, little girl,” whispered Sir Lucien, and he laid his hand upon her shoulder. But she leapt up, her pupils suddenly dilating and her delicate nostrils twitching in a manner which unmistakably pointed to the impossibility of thwarting her if sanity were to be retained. “Ring him up, Lucy,” she repeated in a low voice. “He is there. Now that I have someone behind me I see my way at last!” “There may, nevertheless, be a better way,” said Sir Lucien; but he added quickly: “Very well, dear, I will do as you wish. I have a little cocaine, which I will give you.” He went out to the telephone, carefully closing the study door. That he had counted upon the influence of the drug to reduce Rita to a more reasonable frame of mind was undoubtedly the fact, for presently as they proceeded on foot towards old Bond Street he reverted to something like his old ironical manner. But Rita’s determination was curiously fixed. Unmoved by every kind of appeal, she proceeded to the appointment which Sir Lucien had made—ignorant of that which Fate held in store for her—and Sir Lucien, also humanly blind, walked on to meet his death. PART THIRD THE MAN FROM WHITEHALL CHAPTER XXIII. CHIEF INSPECTOR KERRY RESIGNS