"
We had come to the taxicab stand before the hotel, and Kennedy had
already beckoned to a cab to take her home.
As he handed her in she turned with a little shiver.
"Don't please, think me foolish," she added, with bated breath,
"but often I fear that it is, as we call it, the mal de ojo--the
evil eye!"
XIII
THE POISONED CIGARETTE
There was not a grain of superstition in Kennedy, yet I could see
that he was pondering deeply what Inez Mendoza had just said. Was
it possible that there might be something in it--not objectively,
but subjectively? Might that very fear which the Senorita had of
the Senora engender a feeling that would produce the very result
that she feared? I knew that there were strange things that modern
psychology was discovering. Could there be some scientific
explanation of the evil eye?
Kennedy turned and went back into the hotel, to keep his
appointment with Whitney, and as he did so I reflected that,
whatever credence might be given the evil-eye theory, there was
something now before us that was a fact--the physical condition
which Inez had observed in her father before his death, saw now in
Whitney, and foresaw in Lockwood. Surely that in itself
constituted enough of a problem.
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