The change in her after she had snuffed some of the crystals was magical.  From a quivering wretch she had become now a self-confident neurasthenic.

“You know where that stuff will land you, I presume?” questioned Kennedy.

“I don’t care,” she laughed hollowly.  “Yes, I know what you are going to tell me.  Soon I’ll be hunting for the cocaine bug, as they call it, imagining that in my skin, under the flesh, are worms crawling, perhaps see them, see the little animals running around and biting me.  Oh, you don’t know.  There are two souls to the cocainist.  One is tortured by the suffering which the stuff brings; the other laughs at the fears and pains.  But it brings such thoughts!  It stimulates my mind, makes it work without, against my will, gives me such visions—­oh, I can not go on.  They would kill me if they knew I had come to you.  Why have I?  Has not Haddon cast me off?  What is he to me, now?”

It was evident that she was growing hysterical.  I wondered whether, after all, the story of the kidnapping of Haddon might not be a figment of her brain, simply an hallucination due to the drug.

“They?” inquired Kennedy, observing her narrowly.  “Who?”

“I can’t tell.  I don’t know.  Why did I come?  Why did I come?”

She was reaching again for the snuff-box, but Kennedy restrained her.

“Miss Keith,” he remarked, “you are concealing something from me.  There is some one,” he paused a moment, “whom you are shielding.”

“No, no,” she cried.  “He was taken.  Brodie had nothing to do with it, nothing.  That is what you mean.  I know.  This stuff increases my sensitiveness.  Yet I hate Coke Brodie—­oh—­let me go.  I am all unstrung.  Let me see a doctor.  To-night, when I am better, I will tell all.”

Loraine Keith had torn herself from him, had instantly taken a pinch of the fatal crystals, with that same ominous change from fear to self-confidence.  What had been her purpose in coming at all?  It had seemed at first to implicate Brodie, but she had been quick to shield him when she saw that danger.  I wondered what the fascination might be which the wretch exercised over her.

“To-night—­I will see you to-night,” she cried, and a moment later she was gone, as unexpectedly as she had come.

I looked at Kennedy blankly.

“What was the purpose of that outburst?” I asked.

“I can’t say,” he replied.  “It was all so incoherent that, from what I know of drug fiends, I am sure she had a deep-laid purpose in it all.  It does not change my plans.”

Two hours later we had paid a deposit on an empty flat in the tenement-house in which the bomb-maker had his headquarters, and had received a key to the apartment from the janitor.  After considerable difficulty, owing to the narrowness of the air-shaft, Kennedy managed to pick up the loose ends of the wire which had been led out of the little window at the base of the shaft, and had attached it to a couple of curious arrangements which he had brought with him.  One looked like a large taximeter from a motor cab; the other was a diminutive gas-metre, in looks at least.  Attached to them were several bells and lights.