I'm ready."

Eben Tollman noted that under the steady normality and evenness of his wife's demeanor there stirred an indefinable current of nervousness, since the evening of the tryst at the float and that the whole manner of the visitor toward himself was tinctured with a new brusqueness, as though the requirement of maintaining a cordial pretense were becoming over tedious.

These were mere bits of chaff in a light breeze and he flattered himself that it had taken his own perspicacity to detect them. A less capable diagnostician might have passed them by unobserved. But to him they marked a boundary.

Alone in his study, the husband ruminated upon these topics. Here he had sanctuary and the necessity of a hateful dissimulation was relaxed. He could then throw aside that mantle of urbanity which he must yet endure for a while before other eyes. He formed the habit of gazing up at the portrait of the ancestor who had died in the revolution and almost fancied that between his own eyes and those painted on the canvas there was an interchange of understanding.

He was in truth a man who had already parted company with reason while still invested in its perfect masquerade. His bitter and unfounded suspicions, denied all outer expression, had undermined his sanity--and any one who had seen him in these moments of sequestered brooding would have recognized the mad glitter in his eyes.

"The pair of them are as guilty as perdition," he murmured to himself, "and I am God's instrument to punish." Punish--but how? That was a detail which he had never quite thought out, but at the proper time the Providence which commanded him would also show him a way. But before punishment there must be an overt act--an episode which clinched, beyond peradventure, the sin of these two hypocrites before his hand could fall in vengeance.

These reflections were interrupted one afternoon by a rap on the study door to which, for the space of several seconds, Eben Tollman did not respond.

He was meanwhile doing what an actor does before his dressing-room mirror. Eben Tollman alone with his monomania and Eben Tollman in the company of others were separate personalities and to pass from one to the other called for making up; for schooling of expression and the recovery of a suave exterior. In this process, however, he had from habit acquired celerity, so the delay was not a marked one before, with a decorous face, unstamped of either passion or brooding, he opened the door, to find Conscience waiting at the threshold.

"Come in, my dear," he invited. "I must have inadvertently snapped the catch. I didn't know it was locked."

"There's a man named Hagan here who wants to see you, Eben," announced Conscience. "He didn't seem inclined to tell me his business beyond saying that it was important."

"Hagan, Hagan?" repeated the master of the house with brows drawn in well-simulated perplexity. "I don't seem to recognize the name. Do you know him?"

"I never saw him before. Shall I send him in?"

"I suppose it might be as well. Some business promoter, I fancy."

But as Conscience left, Tollman's scowl returned.

"Hagan," he repeated with a soft but wrathful voice to himself. "The blackmailer!"

His face bore a somewhat frigid welcome, when almost immediately the manager of the Searchlight Investigation Bureau presented himself.

Mr. Hagan had the appearance of one into whose lap the horn of plenty has not been recently or generously tilted, and the clothes he wore, though sprucely tailored, were of another season's fashion.

But his manner had lost none of its pristine assurance and he began his interview by laying a hand on the door-knob and suggesting: "The business I want to take up with you, Mr. Tollman, had best be discussed out of hearing of others."

Tollman remained unhospitably rigid and his eyes narrowed into an immediate hostility.

"Whatever business we may have had, Mr. Hagan," he suggested, "has for some time been concluded, I think."

But on this point the visitor seemed to hold a variant opinion.

Momentarily his face abandoned its suavity and the lower jaw thrust itself forward with a marked hint of belligerency.

"So?" he questioned. "Nonetheless there is business that can be done at the present time in this house. It's for you to say whether I do it with you--or others."

Tollman's scowl deepened and the thought presented itself that he had been unwise in ever giving such a dishonest fellow the hold upon him of a prior employment. But he controlled himself and invited curtly, "Very well. Sit down."

Mr. Hagan did so, and this time it was Mr. Tollman himself who somewhat hastily closed and latched the door which protected their privacy of interview, while the guest broached his topic.

"The best way to start is with the recital of a brief story. You may already have read some of it in the newspapers but the portion that concerns us most directly wasn't published. It's what is technically called the 'inside story.'"

"The best way to start, Mr. Hagan," amended Tollman with some severity of manner, "is that which will most quickly bring you to the point and the conclusion. I'm a very busy man and can spare you only a short time."

But despite that warning the detective sat for a moment with his legs crossed and gave his attention to the deliberate kindling of a cigar.

That rite being accomplished to his satisfaction, he settled back and sent a cloud of wreathed smoke toward the ceiling before he picked up again his thread of conversation.

CHAPTER XXVII

Even when he had comfortably settled himself Mr. Hagan's initial comment was irrelevant.

"Your place is decidedly changed, Mr. Tollman. Improved I should call it."

"Thank you. Please state your business."

"On one of the cross streets in the forties in New York City there's a hotel called the Van Styne with a reputation none too savory and downtown there's a sort of mission organization in which a minister, name of Sam Haymond, takes an interest. He's a live-wire reform worker."

"Indeed?" Eben Tollman's monosyllabic rejoinder conveyed the impression of an interest unawakened, but Mr. Hagan was not so soon discouraged.

"Doesn't interest you yet? Maybe it will later. Recently a girl by the name of Minnie Ray fell out of a window at the hotel I'm speaking of--the Van Styne. It killed her."

"Yes?"

"I thought likely you'd read the item in the papers. The coroner's verdict was accident."

"Yes?" These brief, interrogatory replies might have proved dampening to some narrators. Not so with Mr. Hagan. He nodded his head, then he asserted briefly. "But as a matter of fact the Ray woman committed suicide."

"You disagree, it appears, with the coroner."

"I have the facts--and it was seen to that the coroner didn't."

"What bearing has this deplorable episode on our alleged business, Mr.

Hagan?" asked Tollman, and the detective raised an index finger.

"That's what I'm coming to. The Ray woman is only incidental--like others that get adrift in New York and end up in places like the Van Styne. Anyhow I'm not starting out to harrow you with any heart-interest stories.... I'm here to talk business, but you know how it sometimes is, Mr. Tollman. A share or two of stock worth par or less may swing the control of a corporation ... and a piece of human drift like Minnie might turn out to be a human share of stock."

"I'm afraid I don't follow you, sir."

"Don't let that trouble you. You will. Minnie Ray didn't have much education when she came on east from Indiana and I expect she didn't have a very heroic character either. But until she went to the Van Styne, she seems to have been straight."

"There is always an 'until' in these cases," observed Mr. Tollman dryly and the head of the "Searchlight" nodded his acquiescence.

"Sure there is. She was young and what the rounders call a good-looking chicken. At first she was inclined to be haughty and upstage when men she worked for got fresh with her which didn't help her to get jobs--or hold them. So she hit the toboggan. She spent what little money she brought with her and after that it was the old story. So far as Minnie could figure prospects there wasn't a thing she had or a thing she could do that would bring in money--except the one asset that wasn't on the market: her virtue. As I said I didn't start out to tell a sob story, but in this business we see quite a few cases like that. It's usually just a question of how long these girls can hold out before they sell the one thing that's saleable. Maybe you can't blame them at that. If virtue is measured that way--and it's a practical way--the 'until,' as you call it, came to Minnie at the end of quite a siege."

Mr. Tollman's impatience grew into actual fretfulness as his visitor delayed coming to the point of his proposition.