“Sir Lucien Pyne has rung up, Madam, and wishes to speak to you.”

Sir Lucien!  Sir Lucien had come back?  Rita experienced a swift return of feverish energy.  Half dressed as she was, and without pausing to take a wrap, she ran out to the telephone.

Never had a man’s voice sounded so sweet as that of Sir Lucien when he spoke across the wires.  He was at Albemarle Street, and Rita, wasting no time in explanations, begged him to await her there.  In another ten minutes she had completed her toilette and had sent Nina to ’phone for a cab. (One of the minor details of his wife’s behavior which latterly had aroused Irvin’s distrust was her frequent employment of public vehicles in preference to either of the cars.)

Quentin Gray she had quite forgotten, until, as she was about to leave: 

“Is there any message for Mr. Gray, Madam?” inquired Nina naively.

“Oh!” cried Rita.  “Of course!  Quick!  Give me some paper and a pencil.”

She wrote a hasty note, merely asking Gray to proceed to the restaurant, where she promised to join him, left it in charge of the maid, and hurried off to Albemarle Street.

Mareno, the silent, yellow-faced servant who had driven the car on the night of Rita’s first visit to Limehouse, admitted her.  He showed her immediately into the lofty study, where Sir Lucien awaited.

“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.