



Produced by Al Haines









[Illustration: Cover art]





[Frontispiece:  He could picture in the next box Cydonia's golden head
at just the same angle and in between the narrow velvet curtains barely
separating the pair.  _See page 93_.]






THE MAN WITH

THE DOUBLE HEART



BY

MURIEL HINE

(MRS. SIDNEY COXON)




LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY

TORONTO: BELL & COCKBURN : : MCMXIV




COPYRIGHT, 1914

BY JOHN LANE COMPANY



J. J. Little & Ives Company

New York, U. S. A.




TO

MY MOTHER




  Some starlit garden grey with dew
  Some chamber flushed with wine and fire
  What matters where, so I and you
        Are worthy our desire?
                          --_W. L. Henley_.




THE MAN WITH

THE DOUBLE HEART




PART I

  "Flower o' the broom
  Take away love and our earth is a tomb!"
        --_R. Browning_.




CHAPTER I

The hour was close on midday, but the lamps in Cavendish Square shone
with a blurred light through the unnatural gloom.

The fog, pouring down from Regent's Park above, was wedged tight in
Harley Street like a wad of dirty wool, but in the open space fronting
Harcourt House it found room to expand and took on spectral shape; dim
forms with floating locks that clung to the stunted trees and,
shuddering, pressed against the high London buildings which faded away
indistinctly into the blackened sky.

From thence ragged pennons went busily fluttering South to be caught in
the draught of the traffic in noisy Oxford Street, where hoarse and
confusing cries were blent with the rumble of wheels in all the
pandemonium of man at war with the elements.

The air was raw and sooty, difficult to breathe, and McTaggart, already
irritable with the nervous tension due to his approaching interview,
his throat dry, his eyes smarting as he peered at the wide crossing,
started violently as the horn of an unseen motor sounded unpleasantly
near at hand.

"Confound the man!" he said, in apology to himself and stepped back
quickly onto the narrow path as a shapeless monster with eyes of flame
swung past, foiled of its prey.

"A nice pace to go on a day like this!"  And here something struck him
sharply in the rear, knocking his hat forward onto the bridge of his
nose.

"What the...!" he checked his wrath with a sudden shamefaced laugh as
he found his unseen adversary to consist of the square railings.

Somewhere down Wigmore Street a clock boomed forth the hour.  A quarter
to twelve.  McTaggart counted the strokes and gave a sigh of relief not
unmixed with amusement: the secret congratulation of an unpunctual man
redeemed by an accident from the error of his ways.

Wedging his hat more firmly down on his head, he dared again the black
space before him, struck the curb on the opposite side and, one hand
against the wall, steered round the corner and up into Harley Street.

Under the first lamp he paused and hunted for the number over the
nearest door where four brass plates menaced the passer-by with that
modern form of torture that few live to escape--the inquisitorial
process known as dentistry.

Making a rapid calculation, he came to the conclusion that the house he
sought must lie at the further end of the street--London's "Bridge of
Sighs"--where breathless hope and despair elbow each other ceaselessly
in the wake of suffering humanity.

The fog was changing colour from a dirty yellow to opal, and the damp
pavement was becoming visible as McTaggart moved forward with a quick
stride that held an elasticity which it did not owe to elation.

He walked with an ease and lightness peculiar in an Englishman who,
athletic as he may be, yet treads the earth with a certain conscious
air of possessing it: a tall, well-built man, slender and very erect,
but without that balanced stiffness, the hall-mark of "drill."

A keen observer would guess at once an admixture of blood that betrayed
its foreign strain in that supple grace of his; in the olive skin, the
light feet, and the glossy black hair that was brushed close and thick
to his shapely head.

Not French.  For the Frenchman moves on a framework of wire, fretting
toward action, deadly in attack.  But the race that bred Napoleon,
subtle and resistant, built upon tempered steel that bends but rarely