Another woman, if possible even uglier than the last, approached him with a similar request.
"Let me have a spell at once," she said, "that will make every member of the Government be run over by taxis--and killed. They are monsters, tyrants--I abominate them. Let them be slowly--very slowly--SQUASHED to death!"
"Very well, madam," Kelson said, carefully concealing a smile, "here is what you want--wear it next your heart;" and he gave her a locket, containing a magnes microcosmi charged with the essence of life of a leper, which he had procured at considerable risk and expense.
"I consider your fee far too high," the Suffragette said. "You take advantage of me because I'm a woman."
"Very well, madam," he said, "I will make an exception in your case, and let you have it for half the sum."
With a good deal more grumbling she paid the half fee, and, fastening the locket round her neck, flounced out of the building. As Kelson gleefully anticipated, the spell acted in less than two days, and with such success, that he was more than compensated for the monetary loss.
Shortly afterwards, Kelson received a frantic visit from another Suffragette--a woman whose virulent sandy hair at once aroused his animosity.
"Quick! Quick!" she cried, bursting into the room where he was sitting. "Let me have a spell that will blow up every Cabinet Minister, and their wives and families as well."
"Such an ambitious request as that, madam," Kelson rejoined, "cannot be granted in a hurry. I must have time--to--"
"No! No! At once!" the lady cried, stamping her feet with ill-suppressed rage.
"--to consider how it can best be done," Kelson went on calmly. "I must have time to think."
The lady fumed, but Kelson remained inexorable; and directly she had gone, he made a wax image of her, and taking up a knife chopped its head off. In the evening, he learned that a lady answering to her description had been run over by a train at Chislehurst--and decapitated.
Kelson grew heartily sick of the Suffragettes. They were not only plain but abusive, and he complained bitterly to Hamar.
"Look here," he said, "it's not fair. You and Curtis see all the decent-looking women and shelve all the rest on me. I'll stand it no longer." And he spoke so determinedly, that Hamar thought it politic to humour him.