Mrs. Marteen was a blackmailer, an extortioner—­that was the truth, the truth that he would not let himself recognize.  Her depredations probably had much wider scope than he guessed.  He must save her from herself; he must somehow reach the submerged personality and awaken it to the hideousness of that other, the soulless, heartless automaton that schemed and executed crimes with mechanical exactitude.  He took a long breath of determination, and again grinned at the farce he was playing for his own benefit.  Through repetition he was beginning to believe in the fiction of his former intimacy with Marteen.  True, he had known him slightly, had once or twice snatched a hasty luncheon in his company at one of his clubs; but far from liking each other, the two men had been fundamentally antagonistic.  Neither was Dorothy an excuse for his peculiar state of mind.  He was drawn to her with strong protective yearning.  Her childlike beauty pleased him.  He wished she were his daughter, or a little sister to pet and spoil.  But it was not for her sake that he savagely longed to make the mother into something different, “remolded nearer to his heart’s desire.”  Was it the woman herself, or her enigmatic dual personality that held him?  He wished he knew.  He found his mind divided, his emotions many and at cross purposes.  His keen, almost clairvoyant intuition was at fault for once.  It sent no sure signal through the fog of his troubled heart.

How would it all end?  Ah, how would it end?  He sensed the situation as one of climax.  It could not quietly dissolve itself and be absorbed in the sea of time and forgotten commonplace.

As an outlet for his mental discomfort, his restless spirit busied itself in hating Victor Mahr.  He had always disliked the man; now he malignantly resented his very existence; Mahr became the personification of the thing he most wished to forget—­the victimizing power of the woman who had enthralled him.  Gard had met the one element he could not control or change—­the past; and his conquering soul raged at its own impotence.

“There shall be no more of this!” he said aloud.  “She sha’n’t again.  I’ll—­”

“I’ll what?” the demon in his brain jeered at him.  “What will you do?  She will not ‘be under obligations.’  Perhaps, even, she likes her strange profession; perhaps she finds the delight of battle, that you know so well, in pitting her wits against the brains of the mighty; perhaps she has a cynic soul that finds a savage joy in running down the faults of the seemingly faultless—­running them to earth and taking her profit therefrom.  Who are you, Marcus Gard, to cavil at the lust of conquest—­to sneer at the controlling of destinies?”

“I won’t be beaten,” declared his ego, “even if I have no weapon.  I’ll search till I find the way to the citadel, and if there is none open, I’ll smash one through!”

* * * * *

V