Lawanne sat down.

“It was so unnecessary; so useless,” he went on in that lifeless tone.  “The damned, egotistic fool!  Two lives sacrificed to a stupid man’s wounded vanity.  That’s all.  She was a singularly attractive woman.  She would have been able to get a lot out of life.  And I don’t think she did, or expected to.”

“Did you have any idea that Mills had that sort of feeling for her?” Hollister asked.

“Oh, yes,” Lawanne said absently.  “I saw that.  I understood.  I was touched a little with the same thing myself.  Only, noblesse oblige.  And also I was never quite sure that what I felt for her was sympathy, or affection, or just sex.  I know I can scarcely bear to think that she is dead.”

He leaned back in his chair and put his hands over his eyes.  Hollister got up and walked to a window.  Then on impulse he went to the door.  And when he was on the threshold, Lawanne halted him.

“Don’t go,” he said.  “Stay here.  I can’t get my mind off this.  I don’t want to sit alone and think.”

Hollister turned back.  Neither did he want to sit alone and think.  For as the first dazed numbness wore off, he began to see himself standing alone—­more alone than ever—­gazing into a bottomless pit, with Fate or Destiny or blind Chance, whatever witless force was at work, approaching inexorably to push him over the brink.

CHAPTER XXII

To the world outside the immediate environs of the Toba, beyond those who knew the people concerned, that double murder was merely another violent affair which provided material for newspapers, a remote event allied to fires, divorces, embezzlements, politics, and scandals in high finance,—­another item to be glanced quickly over and as quickly forgotten.

But one man at least could not quickly forget or pass it over lightly.  Once the authorities—­coming from a great distance, penetrating the solitude of the valley with a casual, business-like air—­arrived, asked questions, issued orders, sent two men abroad in search of the slayer, and removed the bodies to another jurisdiction, Hollister had nothing more to do with that until he should be called again to give formal testimony.

He was left with nothing to do but brood, to sit asking unanswerable questions of a world and a life that for him was slowly and bewilderingly verging upon the chaotic, in which there was no order, no security, no assurance of anything but devastating changes that had neither rhyme nor reason in their sequence.  There might be logical causes, buried obscurely under remote events, for everything that had transpired.  He conceded that point.  But he could not establish any association; he could not trace out the chain; and he revolted against the common assumption that all things, no matter how mysterious, work out ultimately for some common good.