people. And I don't know whether she would
ever have been interested in me at all if I hadn't used a little--a
little charm the Hindoo taught me. Perhaps that didn't have much to do
with it--but I had never been happy with her. However that may be, one
evening when she seemed unusually approachable, I had just the same
impulse that I had when I met you here tonight, and I told her about
Wolansky and Father. She pooh-poohed it all just as you did. But she was
afraid. I could see that. She was more and more afraid of me as the days
went by. For a long time she tried to be cordial and natural in my
presence, but it was a sham and the poor thing couldn't keep it up. Each
of us knew as well what was in the mind of the other as if we had talked
the situation over frankly for hours. We reached the point where we
couldn't look each other in the face. No solitude could have been as
ghastly as that solitude of two people who shared a revolting secret.
For I had convinced her that I was guilty. I had succeeded in doing what
I had set out to do, and I had ruined two lives in doing it. I have the
faculty, it seems, of poisoning whatever I touch. Only today, my wife
said to me----"

I started to my feet with a great rush of relief and thankfulness. "Ah,
your wife is alive, then?" I cried.

"My wife is alive. That is--my _second_ wife is alive," he said, with a
horrible forced smile.

I sank back gasping. "What did you do with your first wife, you dirty
hound?" I moaned in helpless indignation.

* * * * *

He closed his eyes, and a wave of bitter triumph played about the
muscles of his mouth. "Have I convinced _you_ too, at last?" he said.

Then I realized that I had been an insulting idiot. At worst, the man
before me was a pathological case, and he certainly belonged in an
asylum rather than in a prison.

"Forgive me, Banaotovich," I panted. "I don't know what made me----"

He looked at me sadly, almost compassionately. "There is nothing to
forgive," he said, very quietly. "I am all you called me and a thousand
times worse. Now let me finish my story."

"You don't need to," I said hastily. "I know all the rest of it."

All interest, I am afraid nearly all sympathy, had gone out of me. What
I wanted most of all was to get away from this melancholy citizen with
power and madness in his gray eyes.

"No, you don't know quite all of it yet," he insisted. "Perhaps if I
tell you the whole story,