She was reaching again for the snuff-box, but Kennedy restrained her.
"Miss Keith," he remarked, "you are concealing something from me. There is some one," he paused a moment, "whom you are shielding."
"No, no," she cried. "He was taken. Brodie had nothing to do with it, nothing. That is what you mean. I know. This stuff increases my sensitiveness. Yet I hate Coke Brodie—oh—let me go. I am all unstrung. Let me see a doctor. To-night, when I am better, I will tell all."
Loraine Keith had torn herself from him, had instantly taken a pinch of the fatal crystals, with that same ominous change from fear to self-confidence. What had been her purpose in coming at all? It had seemed at first to implicate Brodie, but she had been quick to shield him when she saw that danger. I wondered what the fascination might be which the wretch exercised over her.
"To-night—I will see you to-night," she cried, and a moment later she was gone, as unexpectedly as she had come.
I looked at Kennedy blankly.
"What was the purpose of that outburst?" I asked.
"I can't say," he replied. "It was all so incoherent that, from what I know of drug fiends, I am sure she had a deep-laid purpose in it all. It does not change my plans."
Two hours later we had paid a deposit on an empty flat in the tenement-house in which the bomb-maker had his headquarters, and had received a key to the
