“You are the cause of your wife’s dreams.  She feels in them anxiety.  And, according to the modern psychologists who have studied dreams carefully and scientifically, fear and anxiety represent love repressed or suppressed.”

She paused to emphasize the point, glad to note that he was following her.

“That clairvoyant,” she went on, “has found out the truth.  True, it may not have been the part of wisdom for Mildred to have gone to her in the first place.  I pass over that.  I do not know whether you or she was most to blame at the start.  But that woman, in the guise of being her friend, has played on every string of your wife’s lonely heart, which you have wrung until it vibrates.

“Then,” she hastened on, “came your precious friend Drummond, Drummond who has, no doubt, told you a pack of lies about me.  You see that!”

She had flung down on the table a cigarette which she had managed to get at Madame Cassandra’s.

“Smoke it.”

He lighted it gingerly, took a puff or two, puckered his face, frowned, and rubbed the lighted end on the fireplace to extinguish it.

“What is it?” he asked suspiciously.

“Hashish,” she answered tersely.  “Things were not going fast enough to suit either Madame Cassandra or Drummond.  Madame Cassandra helped along the dreams by a drug noted for its effect on the passions.  More than that,” added Constance, leaning over toward him and catching his eye, “Madame Cassandra was working in league with a broker, as so many of the fakers do.  Drummond knew it, whether he told you the truth about it or not.  That broker was a swindler named Davies.”

She was watching the effect on him.  She saw that he had been reserving this for a last shot at her, that he realized she had stolen his own ammunition and appropriated it to herself.

“They were only too glad when Drummond approached them.  There you are, three against that poor little woman—­no, four, including yourself.  Perhaps she was foolish.  But it was not so much to her discredit as to those who cast her adrift when she had a natural right to protection.  Here was a woman with passions which she herself did not understand, and a little money—­alone.  Her case appealed to me.  I knew her dreams.  I studied them.”

Caswell was listening in amazement.  “It is dangerous to be with a person who pays attention to such little things,” he said.

Evidently Drummond himself must have been listening.  The door buzzer sounded and he stepped in, perhaps to bolster up his client in case he should be weakening.

As he met Constance’s eye he smiled superciliously and was about to speak.  But she did not give him time even to say good evening.

“Ask him,” she cried, her eyes flashing, for she realized that it had been part of the plan to confront her, perhaps worm out of her just enough to confirm Drummond’s own story to Caswell, “ask him to tell the truth—­if he is capable of it—­not the truth that will make a good daily report of a hired shadow who colors his report the way he thinks his client desires it, but the real truth.”