He was deadly in earnest as he arose from the chair into which he had dropped after I came in.

“Oh, it’s terrible—­this haunting fear, this obsession that I have had, that, in spite of all I have tried to do, some one, somehow, will defeat me.  Then comes the situation, just at a time when Eugenia and I feel that we have won against Fate, and she in particular needs all the consideration and care in the world—­and--and I am defeated.”

Atherton was again pacing the laboratory.

“I have my car waiting outside,” he pleaded.  “I wish you would go with me to see Eugenia—­now.”

It was impossible to resist him.  Kennedy rose and I followed, not without a trace of misgiving.

The Atherton mansion was one of the old houses of the city, a somber stone dwelling with a garden about it on a downtown square, on which business was already encroaching.  We were admitted by a servant who seemed to walk over the polished floors with stealthy step as if there was something sacred about even the Atherton silence.  As we waited in a high-ceilinged drawing-room with exquisite old tapestries on the walls, I could not help feeling myself the influence of wealth and birth that seemed to cry out from every object of art in the house.

On the longer wall of the room, I saw a group of paintings.  One, I noted especially, must have been Atherton’s ancestor, the founder of the line.  There was the same nose in Atherton, for instance, a striking instance of heredity.  I studied the face carefully.  There was every element of strength in it, and I thought instinctively that, whatever might have been the effects of in-breeding and bad alliances, there must still be some of that strength left in the present descendant of the house of Atherton.  The more I thought about the house, the portrait, the whole case, the more unable was I to get out of my head a feeling that though I had not been in such a position before, I had at least read or heard something of which it vaguely reminded me.

Eugenia Atherton was reclining listlessly in her room in a deep leather easy chair, when Atherton took us up at last.  She did not rise to greet us, but I noted that she was attired in what Kennedy once called, as we strolled up the Avenue, “the expensive sloppiness of the present styles.”  In her case the looseness with which her clothes hung was exaggerated by the lack of energy with which she wore them.

She had been a beautiful girl, I knew.  In fact, one could see that she must have been.  Now, however, she showed marks of change.  Her eyes were large, and protruding, not with the fire of passion which is often associated with large eyes, but dully, set in a puffy face, a trifle florid.  Her hands seemed, when she moved them, to shake with an involuntary tremor, and in spite of the fact that one almost could feel that her heart and lungs were speeding with energy, she had lost weight and no longer had the full, rounded figure of health.  Her manner showed severe mental disturbance, indifference, depression, a distressing deterioration.  All her attractive Western breeziness was gone.  One felt the tragedy of it only too keenly.