“Then—­I am very grateful for what you have done.”

“It was so fortunate—­”

“Would you be seated if you please?”

She took the chair beside his bed.

“It was nice of you,” he said, almost sullenly.  “Few women of your sort would bother with a drunken man.”

They both flushed.  She said calmly:  “It is women of my sort who do exactly that kind of thing.”

He gave her a dark and sulky look:  “Not often,” he retorted:  “there are few of your sort from Samaria.”

There was a silence, then he went on in a hard voice: 

“I’d been drinking a lot... as usual....  But it isn’t an excuse when I say that my beastly condition was not due to a drunken stupor.  It just didn’t happen to be that time.”

She shivered slightly.  “It happened to be due to chloral,” he added, reddening painfully again.  “I merely wished you to know.”

“Yes, they told me,” she murmured.

After another silence, during which he had been watching her askance, he said:  “Did you think I had taken that chloral voluntarily?”

She made no reply.  She sat very still, conscious of vague pain somewhere in her breast, acquiescent in the consciousness, dumb, and now incurious concerning further details of this man’s tragedy.

“Sometimes,” he said, “the poor devil who, in chloral, seeks a-refuge from intolerable pain becomes an addict to the drug....  I do not happen to be an addict.  I want you to understand that.”

The painful colour came and went in the girl’s face; he was now watching her intently.

“As a matter of fact, but probably of no interest to you,” he continued, “I did not voluntarily take that chloral.  It was administered to me without my knowledge—­when I was more or less stupid with liquor....  It is what is known as knockout drops, and is employed by crooks to stupefy men who are more or less intoxicated so that they may be easily robbed.”

He spoke now so calmly and impersonally that the girl had turned to look at him again as she listened.  And now she said:  “Were you robbed?”

“They took my hotel key:  nothing else.”

“Was that a serious matter, Mr. McKay?”

He studied her with narrowing brown eyes.

“Oh, no,” he said.  “I had nothing of value in my room at the Astor except a few necessaries in a steamer-trunk....  Thank you so much for all your kindness to me, Miss Erith,” he added, as though relieving her of the initiative in terminating the interview.

As he spoke he caught her eye and divined somehow that she did not mean to go just yet.  Instantly he was on his guard, lying there with partly closed lids, awaiting events, though not yet really suspicious.  But at her next question he rose abruptly, supported on one elbow, his whole frame tense and alert under the bed-coverings as though gathered for a spring.

“What did you say?” he demanded.