McCarren nodded vehemently.  “Dogged your steps, eh?  Wouldn’t let you sleep?  The time came when you had to make a clean breast of it?”

“I had to.  Can’t you understand?”

The reporter struck his fist on the table.  “God, sir!  I don’t suppose there’s a human being with a drop of warm blood in him that can’t picture the deadly horrors of remorse—­”

The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him for the word.  What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a conceivable motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most adequate; and, as he said, once one could find a convincing motive, the difficulties of the case became so many incentives to effort.

“Remorse—­remorse,” he repeated, rolling the word under his tongue with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular drama; and Granice, perversely, said to himself:  “If I could only have struck that note I should have been running in six theatres at once.”

He saw that from that moment McCarren’s professional zeal would be fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to propose that they should dine together, and go on afterward to some music-hall or theatre.  It was becoming necessary to Granice to feel himself an object of pre-occupation, to find himself in another mind.  He took a kind of gray penumbral pleasure in riveting McCarren’s attention on his case; and to feign the grimaces of moral anguish became a passionately engrossing game.  He had not entered a theatre for months; but he sat out the meaningless performance in rigid tolerance, sustained by the sense of the reporter’s observation.

Between the acts, McCarren amused him with anecdotes about the audience:  he knew every one by sight, and could lift the curtain from every physiognomy.  Granice listened indulgently.  He had lost all interest in his kind, but he knew that he was himself the real centre of McCarren’s attention, and that every word the latter spoke had an indirect bearing on his own problem.

“See that fellow over there—­the little dried-up man in the third row, pulling his moustache? His memoirs would be worth publishing,” McCarren said suddenly in the last entr’acte.

Granice, following his glance, recognized the detective from Allonby’s office.  For a moment he had the thrilling sense that he was being shadowed.

“Caesar, if he could talk—!” McCarren continued.  “Know who he is, of course?  Dr. John B. Stell, the biggest alienist in the country—­”

Granice, with a start, bent again between the heads in front of him. “That man—­the fourth from the aisle?  You’re mistaken.  That’s not Dr. Stell.”

McCarren laughed.  “Well, I guess I’ve been in court enough to know Stell when I see him.  He testifies in nearly all the big cases where they plead insanity.”

A cold shiver ran down Granice’s spine, but he repeated obstinately:  “That’s not Dr. Stell.”