With an effort Anitra began again.  “It was last night—­quite late—­ at his office at the foot of Wall Street—­he was there alone,” she strove to connect her broken thoughts.  “Some one—­I think it must have been the janitor—­called me up at home and said that my brother was very ill.  Eulalie was there with me.  We hurried down to him.  When we got there Jose was on the floor by his desk, unconscious, struggling for breath, just as he is now.”  “Did you observe anything peculiar?” queried Kennedy.  “Was there anything that might give you a hint of what had happened?”

Anitra Barrios considered.  “Nothing,” she replied, slowly, “except that the windows were all closed.  There was a peculiar odor in the room.  I was so excited over Jose, though, that I couldn’t tell you just what it was like.”

“What did you do?” inquired Craig.

“What could we do, just two girls, all alone?  It was late.  The streets were deserted.  You know how they are down-town at night.  We took him home, to the hotel, in a cab, and called the hotel physician, Doctor Scott.”

Both girls were again weeping silently in each other’s arms.  If there was anything that moved Kennedy to action it was distress of this sort.  Without a word he rose from his desk, and I followed him.  Anitra and Eulalie seemed to understand.  Though they said nothing, they looked their gratitude as we four left the laboratory.

On the way down to the hotel Anitra continued to pour out her story in a fragmentary way.  Her brother and she, it seemed, had inherited from their father a large sugar-plantation in Santa Clara, the middle province of Cuba.

Jose had not been like many of the planters.  He had actually taken hold of the plantation, after the revolution had wrecked it, and had re-established it on modern, scientific lines.  Now it was one of the largest independent plantations on the island.

To increase its efficiency, he had later established a New York office to look after the sale of the raw sugar and had placed it in charge of a friend, Manuel Sandoval.  A month or so before he had come to New York with his sister to sell the plantation, to get the high price that the boom in sugar had made it worth.  It was while he had been negotiating for the sale that he had fallen in love with Eulalie and they had become engaged.

Doctor Scott met us in the sitting-room of the suite which Anitra and her brother occupied, and, as she introduced us, with an anxious glance in the direction of the door of the sick-room, he shook his head gravely, though he did his best to seem encouraging.

“It’s a case of poisoning of some kind, I fear,” he whispered aside to us, at the first opportunity.  “But I can’t quite make out just what it is.”

We followed the doctor into the room.  Eulalie had preceded us and had dropped down on her knees by the bed, passing her little white hand caressingly over the pale and distorted face of Jose.