Chapter 9

"ONE WHO KNOWS"

Norvin Blake dined at his club that evening, returning to his office at about half-past seven. He was relieved to find the place deserted, for he desired an opportunity to think undisturbed. Although this unforeseen twist of events had seemed remarkable, at first, he began to feel that he had been unconsciously waiting for this very hour. Something had always forewarned him that a time would come when he would be forced to take a hand once more in that old affair. Nor was he so much disturbed by the knowledge that Narcone, the butcher, was here in New Orleans as by the memories and regrets which the news aroused.

Entering his private office, he lit the gas, and flinging himself into an easy-chair, gave himself over to recollections of all that the last four years had brought forth. It seemed only yesterday that he had returned from Italy, hot upon the scent which Colonel Neri had uncovered for him. He had been confident, eager, hopeful, yet he had failed, signally, unaccountably. He had combed New York City for a trace of Margherita Ginini with a thoroughness that left no possible means untried. As he looked back upon it now, he wondered if he could ever summon sufficient enthusiasm to attack any other project with a similar determination. He doubted it. Later experience had bred in him a peculiar caution, a shrinking hesitancy at exposing his true feelings, due, no doubt, to that ever-present necessity of watching himself.

Margherita had never written him after her first disappearance; his own letters had been returned from Sicily; the police of New York had failed as those of Rome and Naples and other cities had failed. He had wasted a small fortune in the hire of private detectives. At last, when it was too late to profit him, he had learned that the three women had been in New York at the time of his arrival, but evidently they had become alarmed at his pursuit and fled. It was this which had forced him to give up--the certainty that Margherita knew the motive of his search and resented it. He had never quite recovered from the sting of that discovery, for he was proud, but he had grown too wise to cherish unjust resentment. It merely struck him as a great pity that their lives had fallen out in such unhappy fashion. He never tried to deceive himself into believing that he could forget her, become a new man, and banish the joy and the pain of his past, impartially. There were other women, it is true, who attracted him strongly, aroused his tenderness and appealed to his manhood--and among them Myra Nell Warren. His power of feeling had not been atrophied, rather it had become deeper. Yet his loyalty was never really impaired. In the bottom of his heart he knew that that tawny, slumbrous yet passionate Sicilian girl was his first and his most sacred love.

As he sat alone now, with the evidences of his accomplishment about him, he realized that in spite of his material