He laughed raucously and Alan winced at the sound and cursed the morbid curiosity that had brought him to the bedside of this man who for three years past had held his own future in his dirty hand, or claimed to hold it.  Alan Massey had paid, paid high for the privilege of not knowing things he did not wish to know.

“What kind of a trail had you struck when you wired me, Massey?  I didn’t know you were anxious for details about young John Massey’s career I thought you preferred ignorance.  It was what you bought of me.”

“I know it was,” groaned Alan, dropping into a creaking rocker beside the bed.  “I am a fool.  I admit it.  But sometimes it seems to me I can’t stand not knowing.  I want to squeeze what you know out of you as you would squeeze a lemon until there was nothing left but bitter pulp.  It is driving me mad.”

The sick man eyed the speaker with a leer of malicious satisfaction.  It was meat to his soul to see this lordly young aristocrat racked with misery and dread, to hold him in his power as a cat holds a mouse, which it can crush and crunch at any moment if it will.  Alan Massey’s mood filled Jim Roberts with exquisite enjoyment, enjoyment such as a gourmand feels on setting his teeth in some rare morsel of food.

“I know,” he nodded.  “It works like that often.  They say a murderer can’t keep away from the scene of his crime if he is left at large.  There is an irresistible fascination to him about the spot where he damned his immortal soul.”

“I’m not a criminal,” snarled Alan.  “Don’t talk to me like that or you will never see another cent of my money.”

“Money!” sneered the sick man.  “What’s that to me now?  I’ve lost my taste for money.  It is no good to me any more.  I’ve got enough laid by to bury me and I can’t take the rest with me.  Your money is nothing to me, Alan Massey.  But you’ll pay still, in a different way.  I am glad you came.  It is doing me good.”

Alan made a gesture of disgust and got to his feet, pacing to and fro, his face dark, his soul torn, between conflicting emotions.

“I’ll be dead soon,” went on the malicious, purring voice from the bed.  “Don’t begrudge me my last fling.  When I am in my grave you will be safe.  Nobody in the living world but me knows young John Massey’s alive.  You can keep your money then with perfect ease of mind until you get to where I am now and then,—­maybe you will find out the money will comfort you no longer, that nothing but having a soul can get you over the river.”

The younger man’s march came to a halt by the bedside.

“You shan’t die until you tell me what you know about John Massey,” he said fiercely.

“You’re a fool,” said James Roberts.  “What you don’t know you are not responsible for—­you can forget in a way.  If you insist on hearing the whole story you will never be able to get away from it to your dying day.  John Massey as an abstraction is one thing.  John Massey as a live human being, whom you have cheated out of a name and a fortune, is another.”