Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/270

 "They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He was n't in Montreal. He never had been there!"

"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 381 King Edward when the coast was clear."

"That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant."

He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.

"So you sold me out!" he finally said, studying her white face with his haggard hound's eyes.

"I could n't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You would n't give me the chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you—but