Eve's shadow fell athwart the two, and Lanyard, for all the labouring of his lungs, had an irrepressible chuckle as he looked up into her bewildered face.
"Permit me to introduce the Lone Wolf's last incarnation!" he cried, and jumped up, brandishing the scalp he had taken--"known to the police and social circles of the cabarets as Henry Mallison--Mally for short!"
No responsive elation lightened the dark regard that shifted from Lanyard's face to Mallison's and back again, only a smile pitiful and chiding dawned. "So this," Eve slowly said, and slowly shook her head at the man who loved her, "is why you ran away!"
That look he could no more interpret than he could the riddle of her words; both he requited with a muddled stare. "I?" he blankly wondered--"ran away--?"
She nodded once. "But you didn't know, I'm sure, what you were doing then; it's natural you should not remember. You are yourself tonight--you were not, then."
"Yes," he cried--"thank God! tonight I am myself . . ."
One of her hands went out to this, he caught it between his own, was drawn by it to her bosom. Common impulse moved them aside and away from the man they had forgotten, the man who lay sobbing and fighting for breath on the floor beyond the desk.
"So you come back to me!" It was as if in the gaze that plunged into her eyes his very soul passed out from him to lose itself, and all awareness of the world without themselves as well, in that treasury of love illimitable and incalculable which those eyes disclosed. "So, as I knew you would, you come back to me at last, your honour cleansed! Michael," the woman breathed, yearning to him--"my Michael!"
"What are you telling me? _I_ ran away from you--!"
"Three months after you were injured in that motor accident, while your memory still was uncertain, when often you couldn't recall one day's events on the next . . . without a word of explanation or farewell, one day you left me, disappeared . . ."
"I knew, of course, why . . . It was when the papers were revelling in the sensational 'return'--as they called it--of the Lone Wolf. I had tried to keep it from you, fearing the consequences of the excitement, in your condition; but the hue and cry was out for you, I was at my wits' ends to hide you away from the police, it was necessary to tell you why . . . What I had so feared happened: you brooded incessantly, whenever your mental condition made you forget the affair for a time--as when you'd wake up from a sound night's sleep remembering nothing of the previous day--something was sure to happen to remind you. A hundred times you begged me to let you go, that you might find and expose the scoundrel who was masquerading in your reputation; I knew you were incompetent for that, at the time, and always managed somehow to talk you out of it, until--as I say--abruptly, without word or sign, you left me."