He would see her; he would take her. As for _him_--David's sinewy fingers closed as talons might close into the living flesh of a man's neck. He knew the lust of murder, and he exulted in it. Yet even as he exulted, the baseness of what Blair had done was so astounding, that, sitting there in the dreary room, his hands clenched in his pockets, his legs stretched out in front of him, David Richie actually felt a sort of impersonal amazement that had nothing to do with anger. For one instant the unbelievableness of Blair's dishonor threw him back into that clamoring confusion from which he had escaped since he opened the Door. Blair must have been in love with her! Had Elizabeth suspected it? She certainly had never hinted it to him; why not? Some girlish delicacy? But Blair--Blair, a dishonorable man? In the confounding turmoil of this uprooting of old admirations, he was conscious of the hand-organ down in the alley, pounding out its imbecile refrain. He even found himself repeating the meaningless words: "In ancient days there lived a Turk, A horrid beast within the East, ...... Oh, Kafoozleum, Kafoozleum"-- His mind righted itself; he came back to facts, and to the simple incisive question: what must he do? It was not until the afternoon that, by one tortuous and torturing line of reasoning after another, he came to know that, as her uncle had said, for the present he could do nothing. "Nothing?" At first, David had laughed savagely; he would turn the world upside down before he would leave her in her misery! For that she was in misery he never doubted; nor did he stop to ask himself whether she had repented her madness, he only groaned. He saw, or thought he saw, the whole thing. There was not one doubt, not one poisonous suspicion of Elizabeth herself. That she was disloyal to him never entered his head. To David she was only in a terrible trap, from which, at any cost, she must be rescued. That her own mad temper had brought her to such a pass was neither here nor there; it had nothing to do with the matter in hand, namely her rescue--and then the killing of the man who had trapped her! It came into David's head--like a lamp moving toward him through a mist--that perhaps she had written to him? He had not really grasped the idea when Robert Ferguson suggested it; but now he was suddenly certain that a letter must be awaiting him in Philadelphia! Perhaps in it she called on him to come and help her? The thought was like a whip. He forgot his desire to kill Blair; he leaped to his feet, fumbling in his pocket for a time-table; then realized that there was no train across the mountains until night. Should he telegraph his mother to open any letter from Elizabeth, and wire him where she was? No; even in the whirl of his perplexity, he knew he could not let any other eyes than his own see what, in her abasement, Elizabeth must have written. He began to pace frantically up and down;