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“I heard him mention your name with Mr. Carton’s.”

“Then he knew that I was more than a reporter for the Star,” remarked Kennedy. “Kidnapped, you say? How?”

She shot a glance half of suspicion, half of frankness, at us.

“That’s what I must confess. Whoever did it must have used me as a tool. Mr. Haddon and I used to be good friends–I would be yet.”

There was evident feeling in her tone which she did not have to assume. “All I remember yesterday was that, after lunch, I was in the office of the Mayfair when he came in. On his desk was a package. I don’t know what has become of it. But he gave one look at it, seemed to turn pale, then caught sight of me. ‘Loraine,’ he whispered, ‘we used to be good friends. Forgive me for turning you down. But you don’t understand. Get me away from here–come with me–call a cab.’

“Well, I got into the cab with him. We had a chauffeur whom we used to have in the old days. We drove furiously, avoiding the traffic men. He told the driver to take us to my apartment–and– and that is the last I remember, except a scuffle in which I was dragged from the cab on one side and he on the other.”

She had opened her handbag and taken from it a little snuff-box, like that which we had seen in the den.

“I–I can’t go on,” she apologised, “without this stuff.”

“So you are a cocaine fiend, also?” remarked Kennedy.

“Yes, I can’t help it. There is an indescribable excitement to do something great, to make a mark, that goes with it. It’s soon gone, but while it lasts I can sing and dance, do anything until every part of my body begins crying for it again. I was full of the stuff when this happened yesterday; had taken too much, I guess.”

The change in her after she had snuffed some of the crystals was magical. From a quivering wretch she had become now a self- confident neurasthenic.

“You know where that stuff will land you, I presume?” questioned Kennedy.

“I don’t care,” she laughed hollowly. “Yes, I know what you are going to tell me. Soon I’ll be hunting for the cocaine bug, as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals running around and biting me. Oh, you don’t know. There are two souls to the cocainist. One is tortured by the suffering which the stuff brings; the other laughs at the fears and pains. But it brings such thoughts! It stimulates my mind, makes it work without, against my will, gives me such visions–oh, I can not go on. They would kill me if they knew I had come to you. Why have I? Has not Haddon cast me off? What is he to me, now?”

It was evident that she was growing hysterical. I wondered whether, after all, the story of the kidnapping of Haddon might not be a figment of her brain, simply an hallucination due to the drug.

“They?” inquired Kennedy, observing her narrowly. “Who?”

“I can’t tell. I don’t know. Why did I come? Why did I come?”

She was reaching again for the snuff-box, but Kennedy restrained her.

“Miss Keith,” he remarked, “you are concealing something from me. There is some one,” he paused a moment, “whom you are shielding.”

“No, no,” she cried. “He was taken. Brodie had nothing to do with it, nothing. That is what you mean. I know. This stuff increases my sensitiveness. Yet I hate Coke Brodie–oh–let me go. I am all unstrung. Let me see a doctor. To-night, when I am better, I will tell all.”

Loraine Keith had torn herself from him, had instantly taken a pinch of the fatal crystals, with that same ominous change from fear to self-confidence. What had been her purpose in coming at all? It had seemed at first to implicate Brodie, but she had been quick to shield him when she saw that danger. I wondered what the fascination might be which the wretch exercised over her.