"Just long enough to say one thing to you, Bivens. There's a limit beyond which you and your kind had better not press the men you have wronged. You have made a brave show of your power to-night. Well, you are mistaken if you believe you can longer awe the imagination of the world with its tinsel. You have begun to stir deeper thoughts. Look to your skin. I've always said this is God's world, and it must come out right in the end. I've begun to think to-night there's something wrong.

God can't look down and see what's going on here--the God I've tried to serve and worship, whose praise I have sung beneath the stars on fields of battle with the blood streaming from wounds I got fighting for what I believed to be right. If the devil rules the universe, and dog-eat-dog is the law, there'll be a big hand feeling for your throat, feeling blindly in the dark, perhaps, but it will get there! When I look into your brazen face to-night, and hear the strains of that music, there's something inside of me that wants to kill."

"But you won't, Woodman!" Bivens interrupted with a sneer.

"When it comes to the test your liver is white. I know your breed of men, but I like you better in that mood. It gives me pleasure to torture you, and I'm not going to kick you out."

"I shouldn't advise you to try it," was the grim response.

"No. Your tirade gives me an idea. I want you to stay until the festivities end, and enjoy yourself. Observe that I'm pouring out my wealth here to-night in a river of generosity, and that you are starving for a drop which I refuse to give. Take a look over my house.

It cost two millions to build it, and requires half a million a year to keep it up. I have a country estate of a hundred thousand acres in the mountains of North Carolina, with a French chateau that cost a million.

I only weigh a hundred and fifteen pounds, but I require these palaces to properly house me for a year. Think this over while you stroll among my laughing guests. My art gallery will interest you. I've a single painting there which cost three hundred thousand dollars--the entire collection two millions. The butterflies those dancers are crushing beneath their feet in my ball room, I imported from Central America at a cost of five thousand dollars. The favours in jewelry I shall give to my rich guests who have no use for them will be worth twenty-five thousand dollars. You'll see my wife among the dancers. Her dresses cost a hundred thousand a year. For the string of pearls around her neck I paid a half million. The slippers on her feet cost two thousand--all you need for your daughter's education. Take a good look at it, Woodman, and as the day dawns and my guests depart, some of them drunk on wine that cost twenty-five dollars a bottle--remember that I spent three hundred and fifty thousand on this banquet which lasted eight hours and that I will see you and your daughter dead and in the bottomless pit before I will give you one penny. Enjoy yourself, it's a fine evening."

The crushed man stared at Bivens in a stupor of pain. The brazen audacity of his assault was more than he could foresee. When the full import of its cruelty found his soul, he spoke in faltering tones:

"Only he who is willing to die, Bivens, is the master of life. Well, I go now to meet Death and celebrate defeat."

"And I the sweetest victory of my life--good evening!"

Before the doctor could answer, the financier turned with a laugh and left the room.

For a long time the dazed man stood motionless. He passed his big hand over his forehead in a vague instinctive physical effort to lift the fog of horror and despair that was slowly strangling him.

"My God!" he gasped at last.

The orchestra began a new waltz while the hum of voices, and the laughter of half-drunken revellers floated up the grand stairs and struck upon his ears with a strange new accent. He seemed to have lived a thousand years, and come to life a new man with strange new impulses.

The light of faith that once illumined his soul had suddenly gone out and a new sense of brutal power quivered in every nerve and muscle.

He felt at last his kinship to the torn bleeding bundle of despair he saw dying on the pavement in Union Square.

The music, soft, sweet and sensuous, seemed to fill every nook and corner of the great palace with its low penetrating notes. He felt that he was suffocating. He tore his collar apart to give himself room to breathe. He thrust his hand into the hip pocket of his dress suit where he usually carried a handkerchief and felt something hard and cold.

It was a revolver he had been accustomed to carry of late in his rounds through the dangerous quarters of the city. Without thinking when he dressed, he had transferred it to his evening suit. His hand closed over the ivory handle with a sudden fierce joy. And in a moment the beast that sleeps beneath the skin of religion and culture was in the saddle.

"Yes, I'll kill him in his magnificent ball room--to the strains of his own music!" he said half aloud. "I'll give a fit climax to his dance of Death and the Worm."

He drew the revolver from his pocket, broke it, examined the shells, snapped them in place and thrust the deadly thing in the inner pocket of his coat. He could draw it from there without attracting the attention of his victim.

He quickly descended the stairs and saw Bivens talking to his wife. He didn't wish to kill him in her presence and as he passed a look of hatred flashed from the little black eyes of the millionaire.

The doctor answered with a smile that roused the master of the house to a pitch of incontrollable fury. He left his wife's side, stepped quickly in front of Woodman, hesitated as he was about to utter an oath, changed his mind and resumed his role of host:

"If I can show you any of the treasures of the house, I'll be glad to act as your guide, Woodman!" he said with an effort at laughter.

"Thank you. I've just seen some very interesting pictures."

"Surely you have not finished with my masterpieces so soon?" he said, with mocking protest.

The doctor had made up his mind to kill him at the moment the dance was at the highest pitch of gaiety and he wanted to get him as near the great arch as possible.

His answer was given so politely and evenly the financier was puzzled.

"No, Bivens," he said in a matter-of-fact voice, "the pictures I saw were purely mental. I haven't been to your art gallery yet."

"See it by all means!" he urged with exaggerated politeness. "It's a rare privilege, you know. It's not often the rabble is inside these walls. It's the chance of your life."

"Thank you, I'll find enough to amuse me before I go."

Again the doctor smiled.

Bivens turned on his heels with a muttered oath and disappeared in the crowd. He was plainly disconcerted by his enemy's manner. To see a man of his temperament rise suddenly from the depths of despair into smiling serenity was something uncanny. He left him deliberating whether to call his servants and throw him into the street.

As the doctor waited for the music to begin, he watched the women pass, resplendent in their jewels and magnificent in their nakedness.

To-night he saw it without the excuses of conventional social usage.

"And this," he exclaimed bitterly, "is the highest development of American life; this splendid, sordid, criminal degrading pageant with its sensual appeal; and yet if the house should fall and crush them all, the world would lose nothing of value except the jewelry that might be mixed with its debris!"

He felt for the moment a messenger of divine vengeance. His pistol shot would at least give them something to think about.

The music began, and the dancers once more whirled into the centre of the room and the crowd filled the space under the grand arch which led into the hall. Bivens was the centre of an admiring group of sycophants and worshipful snobs. The doctor's heart gave a mad throb of joy. His hour had come.

With quick strides he covered the space which separated them and without a moment's hesitation thrust his hand into his breast for his revolver. Not a muscle or nerve quivered. His finger touched the trigger softly and he gave Bivens a look which he meant he should take with him into eternity, when just beyond him he saw Harriet. She stood motionless with a look of mute agony on her fair young face, watching Stuart talk to Bivens's wife.

His finger slipped from the trigger and his hand loosed its deadly grip.

"Have I forgotten my baby!" he cried in sudden anguish. And then another vision flashed through his excited brain. A court room, a prisoner, his own bowed figure the centre of a thousand eyes while the jury brought in their verdict. A moment of awful silence and the foreman said:

"Guilty of murder in the first degree."

And the long piercing scream from the broken heart of his little girl.

"No, no, not that!" he groaned in sudden terror, his face white with pain. "I can't kill her, too. No, I must save her, that's why I want to kill him because he has imperilled her life, and I am about to crush her at a single blow. God save and help me!--God! Where is God? He helps those who help themselves in this madman's world. Well, then I'll look out for my own, too!"

His breath came in laboured gasps as one mad thought succeeded another.

"Yes!" he said hoarsely, "I must save her. I must be cunning. I must succeed, not fail. I must get what I came here for. I must save my baby. My own fate is of no importance. She is everything."

[Illustration: "'I must save her. I must be cunning'"]

He watched the dancers, greedily catching the flash of their diamonds, gleaming tiaras, rings, necklaces, bracelets, each worth a king's ransom. Suddenly the idea flashed through his mind:

Bivens had taken from him, by fraud, his formula, destroyed his business and robbed him of all he possessed. The law gave him power to hold it. He, too, would appeal to the same power and take what belonged to him. No matter how, he would take it, and he would take it to-night.

Bivens had boasted that his favours in jewelry given in sheer wantonness of pride to rich guests would be worth twenty-five thousand dollars. His plan was instantly formed.

He turned quickly and began to search the house until he found the half-drunken servant arranging these packages under the direction of a secretary. These favours had been made for the occasion by a famous jeweller; a diamond pin of peculiar design, a gold death's head with diamond teeth and eyes surmounted by a butterfly and a caterpillar. The stones in each piece were worth a hundred dollars. They lay on a table in little open jewel boxes, fifty in a box, and each box contained five thousand dollars' worth of gold and precious stones.

The doctor inspected the boxes with exclamations of wonder and admiration.