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“Don’t you ever dream?” she asked quietly.

He looked at her a moment as if doubting even her mentality.

“Lord,” he exclaimed in disgust, “you, too, defend it?”

“But, don’t you dream?” she persisted.

“Why, of course I dream,” he answered somewhat petulantly. “What of it? I don’t guide my actions by it.”

“Do you ever dream of Mildred?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Ever of other–er–people?” she pursued.

“Yes,” he replied, “sometimes of other people. But what has that to do with it? I cannot help my dreams. My conduct I can help and I do help.”

Constance had not expected him to be frank to the extent of taking her into his confidence. Still, she felt that he had told her just enough. She discerned a vague sense of jealousy in his tone which told her more than words that whatever he might have said or done to Mildred he resented, unconsciously, the manner in which she had striven to gain sympathy outside.

“Fortunately he knows nothing of the new theories,” she said to herself.

“Mrs. Dunlap,” he resumed, “since you have been frank with me, I must be equally frank with you. I think you are far too sensible a woman not to understand in just what a peculiar position my wife has placed me.”

He had taken out of his pocket a few sheets of closely typewritten tissue paper. He did not look at them. Evidently he knew the contents by heart. Constance did not need to be told that this was a sheaf of the daily reports of the agency for which Drummond worked.

He paused. She had been watching him searchingly. She was determined not to let him justify himself first.

“Mr. Caswell,” she persisted in a low, earnest tone, “don’t be so sure that there is nothing in this dream, business. Before you read me those reports from Mr. Drummond, let me finish.”

Forest Caswell almost dropped them in surprise.

“Dreams,” she continued, seeing her advantage, “are wishes, either suppressed or expressed. Sometimes the dream is frank and shows an expressed wish. Other times it shows a suppressed wish, or a wish which in its fulfilment in the dream is disguised or distorted.

“You are the cause of your wife’s dreams. She feels in them anxiety. And, according to the modern psychologists who have studied dreams carefully and scientifically, fear and anxiety represent love repressed or suppressed.”

She paused to emphasize the point, glad to note that he was following her.

“That clairvoyant,” she went on, “has found out the truth. True, it may not have been the part of wisdom for Mildred to have gone to her in the first place. I pass over that. I do not know whether you or she was most to blame at the start. But that woman, in the guise of being her friend, has played on every string of your wife’s lonely heart, which you have wrung until it vibrates.

“Then,” she hastened on, “came your precious friend Drummond, Drummond who has, no doubt, told you a pack of lies about me. You see that!”

She had flung down on the table a cigarette which she had managed to get at Madame Cassandra’s.

“Smoke it.”

He lighted it gingerly, took a puff or two, puckered his face, frowned, and rubbed the lighted end on the fireplace to extinguish it.

“What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

“Hashish,” she answered tersely. “Things were not going fast enough to suit either Madame Cassandra or Drummond. Madame Cassandra helped along the dreams by a drug noted for its effect on the passions. More than that,” added Constance, leaning over toward him and catching his eye, “Madame Cassandra was working in league with a broker, as so many of the fakers do. Drummond knew it, whether he told you the truth about it or not. That broker was a swindler named Davies.”

She was watching the effect on him. She saw that he had been reserving this for a last shot at her, that he realized she had stolen his own ammunition and appropriated it to herself.