Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/380

360 that you could only live by excitement—and I thought it would be easy to show you that this wasn't true, simply by—well, by giving you an overdose of it. Then things got muddled up, as you see they have. Whether I was right or wrong, I wanted to make you tired of all that other kind of life. I tried to make you tired of it. But I never dreamed these other things were going to happen to you!"

"Then you knew I was in Locke's office?" I asked him, compelling myself to calmness.

"Yes, I knew it—and I wanted you out of it," he meekly acknowledged.

"Why?"

"Because I wanted you to help me," he replied, after a moment's pause.

"At what?" I asked.

"At the most dangerous calling a man can possibly have—that of doing nothing!"

I was thinking of the girl above stairs; and the thought of her was like an asbestos curtain between us.

"It seems to me that you've been doing rather too much," I amended.

"Baddie," he pleaded, "don't be too hard on me!"

But there was too much to remember.

"And you knew, all along, that Bud Griswold