Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

“That brings us back to the poison,” McCarren continued, his note-book out.  “Just go over that again, will you?”

And Granice went over it again.  It had all been so simple at the time—­and he had been so clever in covering up his traces!  As soon as he decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard classmate, in the dyeing business—­just the man.  But at the last moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course.  Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory.  Granice had the habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons, and the friends generally sat in Venn’s work-shop, at the back of the old family house in Stuyvesant Square.  Off this work-shop was the cupboard of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles.  Carrick Venn was an original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his place, on a Sunday, was often full of visitors:  a cheerful crowd of journalists, scribblers, painters, experimenters in divers forms of expression.  Coming and going among so many, it was easy enough to pass unperceived; and one afternoon Granice, arriving before Venn had returned home, found himself alone in the work-shop, and quickly slipping into the cupboard, transferred the drug to his pocket.

But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long since dead of his dragging ailment.  His old father was dead, too, the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a boarding-house, and the shifting life of New York had passed its rapid sponge over every trace of their obscure little history.  Even the optimistic McCarren seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of seeking for proof in that direction.

“And there’s the third door slammed in our faces.”  He shut his note-book, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive eyes on Granice’s furrowed face.

“Look here, Mr. Granice—­you see the weak spot, don’t you?”

The other made a despairing motion.  “I see so many!”

“Yes:  but the one that weakens all the others.  Why the deuce do you want this thing known?  Why do you want to put your head into the noose?”

Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his quick light irreverent mind.  No one so full of a cheerful animal life would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive; and Granice racked his brain for one more convincing.  But suddenly he saw the reporter’s face soften, and melt to a naive sentimentalism.

“Mr. Granice—­has the memory of it always haunted you?”

Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening.  “That’s it—­the memory of it ... always ...”