He showed her
immediately into the lofty study, where Sir Lucien awaited.
"Oh, Lucy--Lucy!" she cried, almost before the door had closed behind
Mareno. "I am desperate--desperate!"
Sir Lucien placed a chair for her. His face looked very drawn and
grim. But Rita was in too highly strung a condition to observe this
fact, or indeed to observe anything.
"Tell me," he said gently.
And in a torrent of disconnected, barely coherent language, the
tortured woman told him of Kazmah's attempt to force her to lure
Quentin Gray into the drug coterie. Sir Lucien stood behind her chair,
and the icy reserve which habitually rendered his face an impenetrable
mask deserted him as the story of Rita's treatment at the hands of the
Egyptian of Bond Street was unfolded in all its sordid hideousness.
Rita's soft, musical voice, for which of old she had been famous,
shook and wavered; her pose, her twitching gestures, all told of a
nervous agony bordering on prostration or worse. Finally:
"He dare not refuse you!" she cried. "Ring him up and insist upon him
seeing me tonight!"
"I will see him, Rita."
She turned to him, wild-eyed.
"You shall not! You shall not!" she said. "I am going to speak to that
man face to face, and if he is human he must listen to me.
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