"Ah-h, Maitland," he gasped; "thought you'd ... come."

Racked with sorrow, nothing guessing of the career that had brought the lawyer to this pass, Maitland slipped into a chair by the head of the couch and closed his hand over Bannerman's chubby, icy fingers.

"Poor, poor old chap!" he said brokenly. "How in Heaven--"

But at Bannerman's look the words died on his lips. The lawyer moved restlessly. "Don't pity me," he said in a low tone. "This is what I might have ... expected, I suppose ... man of Anisty's stamp ...

desperate character ... it's all right, Dan, my just due...."

"I don't understand, of course," faltered Maitland.

Bannerman lay still a moment, then continued: "I know you don't. That's why I sent for you.... 'Member that night at the Primordial? When the deuce was it? I ... can't think straight long at a time.... That night I dined with you and touched you up about the jewels? We had a bully salad, you know, and I spoke about the Graeme affair...."

"Yes, yes."

"Well ... I've been up to that game for years. I'd find out where the plunder was, and ... Anisty always divided square.... I used to advise him.... Of course you won't understand,--you've never wanted for a dollar in your life...."

Maitland said nothing. But his hand remained upon the dying man's.

"This would never have happened if ... Anisty hadn't been impatient. He was hard to handle, sometimes. I wasn't sure, you know, about the jewels; I only said I thought they were at Greenfields. Then I undertook to find out from you, but he was restive, and without saying anything to me went down to Greenfields on his own hook--just to have a look around, he said. And so ... so the fat was in the fire."

"Don't talk any more, Bannerman," Maitland tried to soothe him. "You'll pull through this all right, and--You need never have gone to such lengths. If you'd come to me--"'

The ghost of a sardonic smile flitted, incongruously, across the dying man's waxen, cherubic features.

"Oh, hell," he said; "you wouldn't understand. Perhaps you weren't born with the right crook in your nature,--or the wrong one. Perhaps it's because you can't see the fun in playing the game. It's that that counts."

He compressed his lips, and after a moment spoke again. "You never did have the true sportsman's love of the game for its own sake. You're like most of the rest of the crowd--content with mighty cheap virtue, Dan.... I don't know that I'd choose just this kind of a wind-up, but it's been fun while it lasted. Good-by, old man."

He did not speak again, but lay with closed eyes.

Five minutes later Maitland rose and unclasped the cold fingers from about his own. With a heavy sigh he turned away.

At the door Hickey was awaiting him. "Yer lady," he said, as soon as they had drawn apart from the crowd, "is waitin' for yeh in the cab down-stairs. She was gettin' a bit highsteerical 'nd I thought I'd better get her away.... Oh, she's waitin' all right!" he added, alarmed by Maitland's expression.

But Maitland had left him abruptly; and now, as he ran down flight after echoing flight of marble stairs, there rested cold fear in his heart. In the room he had just quitted, a man whom he had called friend and looked upon with affectionate regard, had died a self-confessed and unrepentant liar and thief.

If now he were to find the girl another time vanished,--if this had been but a ruse of hers finally to elude him,--if all men were without honor, all women faithless,--if he had indeed placed the love of his life, the only love that he had ever known, unworthily,--if she cared so little who had seemed to care much....

XVII

CONFESSIONAL

I

But the cab was there; and within it the girl was waiting for him.

The driver, after taking up his fare, had at her direction drawn over to the further curb, out of the fringe of the rabble which besieged the St. Luke Building in constantly growing numbers, and through which Maitland, too impatient to think of leaving by the basement exit, had elbowed and fought his way in an agony of apprehension that brooked no hindrance, heeded no difficulty.

He dashed round the corner, stopped short with a sinking heart, then as the cabby's signaling whip across the street caught his eye, fairly hurled himself to the other curb, pausing at the wheel, breathless, lifted out of himself with joy to find her faithful in this ultimate instance.

She was recovering, whose high spirit and recuperative powers were to him then and always remained a marvelous thing; and she was bending forth from the body of the hansom to welcome him with a smile that in a twinkling made radiant the world to him who stood in a gloomy side street of New York at three o'clock of a summer's morning,--a good hour and a half before the dawn. For up there in the tower of the sky-scraper he had as much as told her of his love; and she had waited; and now--and now he had been blind indeed had he failed to read the promise in her eyes. Weary she was and spent and overwrought; but there is no tonic in all the world like the consciousness that where one has placed one's love, there love has burgeoned in response. And despite all that she had suffered and endured, the happiness that ran like soft fire in her Veins, wrapping her being with its beneficent rapture, had deepened the color in her cheeks and heightened the glamour in her eyes.

And he stood and stared, knowing that in all time to no man had ever woman seemed more lovely than this girl to him: a knowledge that robbed his mind of all other thought and his tongue of words, so that to her fell the task of rousing him.

"Please," she said gently--"please tell the cabby to take me home, Mr.

Maitland."

He came to and in confusion stammered: Yes, he would. And he climbed up on the step with no other thought than to seat himself at her side and drive away for ever. But this time the cabby brought him to his senses, forcing him to remember that some measure of coherence was demanded even of a man in love.

"Where to, sir?"

"Eh, what? Oh!" And bending to the girl: "Home, you said--?"

She told him the address,--a number on Park Avenue, above Thirty-fourth Street, below Forty-second. He repeated it mechanically, unaware that it would remain stamped for ever on his memory, indelibly,--the first personal detail that she had granted him: the first barrier down.

He sat down. The cab began to move, and halted again. A face appeared at the apron,--Hickey's, red and moon-like and not lacking in complacency: for the man counted of profiting variously by this night's work.

"Excuse me, Mr. Maitland, 'nd"--touching the rim of his derby--"yeh, too, ma'am, f'r buttin' in--"

"Hickey!" demanded Maitland suddenly, in a tone of smoldering wrath, "what the--what do you want?"

"Yeh told me tuh call round to-morrow, yeh know. When'll yeh be in?"

"I'll leave a note for you with O'Hagan. Is that all?"

"Yep--that is, there's somethin' else...."

"Well?"

"Excuse me for mentionin' it, but I didn't know--it ain't generally known, yeh know, 'nd one uh th' boys might've heard me speak tuh yer lady by name 'nd might pass it on to a reporter. What I mean's this,"

hastily, as the Maitland temper showed dangerous indications of going into active eruption: "I s'pose yeh don't want me tuh mention't yeh're married, jes' yet? Mrs. Maitland here," with a nod to her, "didn't seem tuh take kindly tuh the notion of it's bein' known--"

"Hickey!"

"Ah, excuse _me!_"

"Drive on, cabby--instantly! Do you hear?"

Hickey backed suddenly away and the cab sprang into motion; while Maitland with a face of fire sat back and raged and wondered.

Across Broadway toward Fourth Avenue dashed the hansom; and from the curb-line Hickey watched it with a humorous light in his dull eyes.

Indeed, the detective seemed in extraordinary conceit with himself. He chewed with unaccustomed emotion upon his cold cigar, scratched his cheek, and chuckled; and, chuckling, pulled his hat well down over his brows, thrust both hands into his trousers pockets, and shambled back to the St. Luke Building--his heavy body vibrating amazingly with his secret mirth.

And so, shuffling sluggishly, he merges into the shadows, into the mob that surges about the building, and passes from these pages.