“Never mind, Hilda,” she snapped out.  “I am not afraid.”

The maid shrugged and departed.

“I have wanted to see her,” Mrs. Hilmer went on, coldly.  “But who could I send? ...  Few people understand her life.”

“Ah, then you have guessed?”

“Guessed? ...  She has told me everything.”

A shade of bitter malice crept into her face—­the malice of a woman who has learned truths and is no longer shocked by them.  Fred Starratt put his hat aside and he went up close to her.

“I lied to get in here,” he said, quickly.  “I am looking for Sylvia Molineaux myself.”

“Why don’t you try the streets, then?” she flung out, venomously.

He felt almost as if an insult had been hurled at him.  He searched Mrs. Hilmer’s face.  Something more than physical pain had harrowed the woman before him to such deliberate mockery.

“You, too!” he cried.  “How you must have suffered!”

She gave a little cackling laugh that made him shudder.  “What about yourself?” she queried.  “You do not look like a happy man.”

“Would you be ... if ...  Look at me closely, Mrs. Hilmer!  Have you ever seen me before?”

He bent toward her.  She took his face between her two clawlike fingers.  Her eyes were points of greedy flame.

When she finally spoke her voice had almost a pensive quality to it.

“You might have been Fred Starratt, once,” she said, evenly.

He rose to his feet.

“I knew you were not dead,” he heard her saying.  “And I don’t think she felt sure, either...  Ah, how I have worried her since that day!  Every morning I used to say:  ’I dreamed of your husband last night.  He was swimming out of a black pool ... a very black pool.’”

She chuckled at the memory of her sinister banter.  So Helen Starratt did not have everything her own way!  There were weapons which even weakness could flourish.

“Where has she gone?” he asked, suddenly.

“South, for a change...  I’ve worried her sick with my black pool.  Whenever the doorbell would ring I would say as sweetly as I could, ‘What if that should be your husband?’ I drove her out with just that...  You’ve come just the right time to help.  It couldn’t have been planned any better.”

She might have been Storch, masquerading in skirts, as she sat there casting significantly narrow glances at him.  He wondered why he had come.  He felt like a fly struggling from the moist depths of a cream jug only to be thrust continually back by a ruthless force.  Was everybody bent on plunging him into the ultimate despair?  He moved back with a poignant gesture of escape.

“You mustn’t count on me, Mrs. Hilmer!” he cried, desperately.  “I’m nothing but a poor, spent man.  I’ve lost the capacity for revenge.”