He took her hand and kissed it passionately.

An instant later Aunt Josephine returned.  Elaine, unstrung by what had happened, excused herself and went into the library.

She sank into one of the capacious arm chairs, and passing her hand wearily over her throbbing forehead, closed her eyes in deep thought.  Involuntarily, her mind travelled back over the rapid succession of events of the past few weeks and the part that she had thought, at least, Kennedy had come to play in her life.

Then she thought of their recent misunderstanding.  Might there not be some simple explanation of it, after all, which she had missed?  What should she do?

She solved the problem by taking up the telephone and asking for Kennedy’s number.

I was chatting with Craig in his laboratory, and, at the same time, was watching him in his experimental work.  Just as a call came on the telephone, he was pouring some nitro-hydrochloric acid into a test tube to complete a reaction.

The telephone tinkled and he laid down the bottle of acid on his desk, while he moved a few steps to answer the call.

Whoever the speaker was, Craig seemed deeply interested, and, not knowing who was talking on the wire, I was eager to learn whether it was anyone connected with the case of the Clutching Hand.

“Yes, this is Mr. Kennedy,” I heard Craig say.

I moved over toward him and whispered eagerly, “Is there anything new?”

A little impatient at being interrupted, Kennedy waved me off.  It occurred to me that he might need a pad and pencil to make a note of some information and I reached over the desk for them.

As I did so my arm inadvertently struck the bottle of acid, knocking it over on the top of the desk.  Its contents streamed out saturating the telephone wires before I could prevent it.  In trying to right the bottle my hand came in contact with the acid which burned like liquid fire, and I cried out in pain.

Craig hastily laid down the receiver, seized me and rushed me to the back of the laboratory where he drenched my hand with a neutralizing liquid.

He bound up the wounds caused by the acid, which proved to be slight, after all, and then returned to the telephone.

To his evident annoyance, he discovered that the acid had burned through the wires and cut off all connection.

Though I did not know it, my hand was, in a sense at least, the hand of fate.

At the other end of the line, Elaine was listening impatiently for a response to her first eager words of inquiry.  She was astounded to find, at last, that Kennedy had apparently left the telephone without any explanation or apology.

“Why—­he rang off,” she exclaimed angrily to herself, as she hung up the receiver and left the room.

She rejoined her Aunt Josephine and Bennett who had been chatting together in the drawing room, still wondering at the queer rebuff she had, seemingly, experienced.