It was very late when he reached Hattie’s door, but he opened it with his latch-key, as he had been used to do.  He stopped to help himself to a glass of brandy, as he had so often done before.  Then he went directly to her room.  She was a light sleeper, and his step awakened her.

“Who is it?” she cried in affright.

“It ’s me.”  His voice was steadier now, but grim.

“What do you want?  Did n’t I tell you never to come here again?  Get out or I ’ll have you taken out.”

She sprang up in bed, glaring angrily at him.

His hands twitched nervously, as if her will were conquering him and he were uneasy, but he held her eye with his own.

“You put me out to-night,” he said.

“Yes, and I ’m going to do it again.  You ’re drunk.”

She started to rise, but he took a step towards her and she paused.  He looked as she had never seen him look before.  His face was ashen and his eyes like fire and blood.  She quailed beneath the look.  He took another step towards her.

“You put me out to-night,” he repeated, “like a dog.”

His step was steady and his tone was clear, menacingly clear.  She shrank back from him, back to the wall.  Still his hands twitched and his eye held her.  Still he crept slowly towards her, his lips working and his hands moving convulsively.

“Joe, Joe!” she said hoarsely, “what ’s the matter?  Oh, don’t look at me like that.”

The gown had fallen away from her breast and showed the convulsive fluttering of her heart.

He broke into a laugh, a dry, murderous laugh, and his hands sought each other while the fingers twitched over one another like coiling serpents.

“You put me out—­you—­you, and you made me what I am.”  The realisation of what he was, of his foulness and degradation, seemed just to have come to him fully.  “You made me what I am, and then you sent me away.  You let me come back, and now you put me out.”

She gazed at him fascinated.  She tried to scream and she could not.  This was not Joe.  This was not the boy that she had turned and twisted about her little finger.  This was a terrible, terrible man or a monster.

He moved a step nearer her.  His eyes fell to her throat.  For an instant she lost their steady glare and then she found her voice.  The scream was checked as it began.  His fingers had closed over her throat just where the gown had left it temptingly bare.  They gave it the caress of death.  She struggled.  They held her.  Her eyes prayed to his.  But his were the fire of hell.  She fell back upon her pillow in silence.  He had not uttered a word.  He held her.  Finally he flung her from him like a rag, and sank into a chair.  And there the officers found him when Hattie Sterling’s disappearance had become a strange thing.

XV

“Dear, damned, Delightful town”