All day she watched through her detectascope.  Once she saw Adele come in and buy more dope.  It was with difficulty that she kept from interfering.  But, she reflected, the time was not ripe.  She had thought the thing out.  There was no use in trying to get at it through Adele.  The only way was to stop the whole curse at its source, to dam the stream.  People came and went.  She soon found that he was selling them packets from a box hidden in the woodwork.  That much she had learned, anyhow.

Constance watched faithfully all day with only time enough taken out for dinner.  It was after her return from this brief interval that she felt her heart give a leap of apprehension, as she looked again through the detectascope.  There was Drummond in the back of the store talking to Muller and a woman who looked as if she might be Mrs. Muller, for both, seemed nervous and anxious.

As nearly as she could make out, Drummond was alternately threatening and arguing with Muller.  Finally the three seemed to agree, for Drummond walked over to a typewriter on a table, took a fresh sheet of carbon paper from a drawer, placed it between two sheets of paper, and hastily wrote something.

Drummond read over what he had written.  It seemed to be short, and the three apparently agreed on it.  Then, in a trembling hand, Muller signed the two copies which Drummond had made, one of which Drummond himself kept and the other he sealed in an envelope and sent away by a boy.  Drummond reached into his pocket and pulled out a huge roll of bills of large denomination.  He counted out what seemed to be approximately half, handed it to the woman, and replaced the rest in his pocket.  What it was all about Constance could only vaguely guess.  She longed to know what was in the letter and why the money had been paid to the woman.

Perhaps a quarter of an hour after Drummond left Adele appeared again, pleading for more dope.  Muller went back of the partition and made up a fresh paper of it from a bottle also concealed.

Constance was torn by conflicting impulses.  She did not want to miss anything in the perplexing drama that was being enacted before her, yet she wished to interfere with the deadly course of Adele.  Still, perhaps the girl would resent interference if she found out that Constance was spying on her.  She determined to wait a little while before seeing Adele.  It was only after a decided effort that she tore herself away from the detectascope and knocked on Adele’s door as if she had just come in for a visit.  Again she knocked, but still there was no answer.  Every minute something might be happening next door.  She hurried back to her post of observation.

One of the worst aspects of the use of cocaine, she knew, was the desire of the user to share his experience with some one else.  The passing on of the habit, which seemed to be one of the strongest desires of the drug fiend, made him even more dangerous to society than he would otherwise have been.  That thought gave Constance an idea.