Page:The Great Harry Thaw Case.djvu/262



He stared at her, pulled at his mustache, and stared and stared. She did not speak to him, but looked away and turned into Twenty-second street.

"He also turned, and as she ran up the stairs of her doctor's he followed her. She became frightened, and ran down the steps and jumped into a hansom and drove to the Lorraine, where she told her husband.

"'He got excited,' she said, 'and bit his nails.' In May, 1906, not long before the hour which was to be Stanford White's last on earth, this is the story that she related to her husband. She told him that Miss Mae MacKenzie had told her that Stanford White had been to the hospital to see her. That she, Mae MacKenzie, had said to him, 'Isn't it nice the way Harry and Evelyn really do care for each other?' and that she said that she had found it out, and that Stanford White said: 'Pooh! I don't believe it.' And Miss MacKenzie had replied: 'Oh, yes; it is true. I know it myself, and I think it is so nice,' and Stanford White had remarked: 'Well, it will not last long. I will get her back.' All this she related to her husband.

"Then, when she told her husband what Mae MacKenzie had told her, he became wild, and began to gnaw his finger nails. Did he not have cause to get wild, to lose that reason which in a civilized community one is supposed to stifle?

"'I stole her once from her mother, I will steal her now from her husband,' Stanford White said. But between him and the consummation of that act there remained the strong arm of that young man to protect her from his snares.

"You remember how at Daly's Theater Harry Thaw and his wife saw Stanford White in a box opposite, and how when he saw him, he became enraged.

"When he looked into those eyes, into which so many