Entrenched in her little top-floor studio, behind a show-case of cotillion-favors, Miss Cecelia Starr sat in her wicker rocker, very quietly and very contentedly sewing. She felt that it had been an exceptionably profitable day for her.

Three hairpins and a linen handkerchief held a watch-case receiver close over her ear, after the style of the metallic ear-bands of a central-office operator. Leading from this improvised ear-band and trailing across the floor out into her private room at the back, ran a green cloth-covered wire. This wire connected again with an innocent-looking and ordinary desk-battery transmitter, rigged up with a lever switch, and standing on a little table next to the wall, up which might be detected the two bimetallic wires which, since ten o’clock that morning, tapped and bridged the general wire connecting the offices of Ottenheimer & Company with the outside world.

From time to time the members of that firm went to their telephone, little dreaming that a young lady, decorously sewing velvet scissors-cases on a studio top-floor of another building, was quietly listening to every message that passed in and out of their bustling place of business. It was a strange medley of talk, some of it incoherent, some of it dull, some of it amusing. Sometimes the busy needle was held poised, and a more interested and startled expression flitted over the shadowy violet eyes of Miss Cecelia Starr. At such times she vaguely felt that she was a disembodied spirit, listening to the hum of a far-away world, or, at other times, that she was an old astrologer, gazing into some mystic and forbidden crystal. Still again, as she listened, she felt like a veritable eagle, invisible, poised high in ethereal emptiness, watching hungrily a dim and far-off sign of earthly life and movement.

Suddenly, from the street door sounded the familiar two-three ring of Durkin. This door remained open during the day, and she waited for him to come up. She went to her own door, however, and laughed girlishly as he stepped into the room, mopping his moist forehead. There was a very alert, nervous, triumphant expression in his eyes, and once again the feeling swept over her that it was now crime, and crime alone, that could stimulate into interest and still satisfy their fagged vitalities. It was their one and only intoxication, the one thing that could awaken them from their mental sloth and stir them from life’s shadowy valley of disillusionment.

Her quick eye had taken note of the fact that he wore a soiled blue uniform, and the leather-peaked blue cap of a Consolidated Gas Company employee, and that he carried with him a brass hand-pump. He laughed a little to himself, put down his pump in one corner of the room, and allowed his fingers to stray through his mutilated Vandyke, now a short and straggly growth of sandy whiskers. Then he turned to her with an unuttered query on his face.

“I was right,” she said quietly, but hurriedly.

“I never really doubted it!”

“Ottenheimer has a private drawer in the vault. It’s in that. His wife telephoned down very cautiously about it this morning. A little later, too, Ottenheimer was called up from a Brooklyn drugstore, by a Mrs. Van Gottschalk, or some such name, who said her husband was still in bed with the grip, and couldn’t possibly get over until Monday. This man, you see, is Ottenheimer’s diamond-cutter.”

“Thank heaven, that gives us a little more time!”

“Three days, at least! But what have you done, Jim?”

“Been trying to persuade the janitor of the Ottenheimer Building that I was sent to pump the water out of his gas-pipes,—but he was just as sure that I wasn’t. I got down in his cellar, though, and had a good look about, before I saw it wouldn’t do to push the thing too far. So I insisted on going up and seeing the owner about that order. There was an inside stairway, and a queer-looking steel door I wanted to get my knuckles against. I started up there, but he hauled me back. I found out, though, that this door is made of one-inch steel armor-plate. There’s another door leading from the foot of the outer hallway into the cellar itself. But that’s only covered with soft sheet-iron—more against fire than anything else. Fifteen minutes will get through that one, easily. It’s the inner door that is the problem. I tried it with a knife-point, just one hard little jab. It took the end off my Roger’s blade.”

“But is this door the only way in?”

“Absolutely; the rear is impossible, bricked-up; and the Avenue itself is a little too conspicuous. The bolts of this door, as far as I can make out, slide into heavy steel cups sunk in solid cement, and are controlled, of course, from inside. Judging from the thickness of these, and the sound of the door, it would take either a pound of soap and nitro-glycerine on the one hand, or five hours of hard drilling with diamond-point drills, on the other, to get through. We’ll say seven hours, altogether, to get into the building. Then comes the safe, or, rather, the vault itself. I had a casual glance at that safe this morning, before I got these duds on—dropped in to purchase an engagement ring, but was altogether too hard to suit. It’s a ten-tonner, I believe, and about as burglar-proof as it can be made. Nothing but a gallon of gun-cotton would make so much as a dent in it. But here again, explosions are not in my line. We’ve got to use these wits of ours. We’ve got to get in that safe, and we’ve got to get through that door! I can’t risk six hours of machine-shop work down there; and I’m still too respectable to drop into safe-cracking.”

“Well, the combinations of that sort of vault, you know, aren’t often advertised on the ash-barrels.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we have got to get it by our own wits, as you say.”

“The janitor, old Campbell, leaves the building about ten-fifteen every night. He’s also a sort of day-watchman, I find. He’s a pretty intelligent and trusty old fellow, absolutely unapproachable from our standpoint. Another thing, too, the place is webbed with Holmes’ burglar-alarm apparatus. It would take another hour or so to get the right wires cut off and bridged. I hate to feel squeamish at this stage of the game—but that Ottenheimer safe does look uninviting!”

Frances walked up and down, with the little watch-case receiver and its handkerchief still crowning her heavy mass of dark hair, like a coronet, and the green wires trailing behind her, like the outline of a bridal-veil. She was thinking quickly and desperately. Suddenly she stopped in the midst of her pacing, and looked hard at Durkin.

“I’ve found it,” she said, in a feverish half-whisper. “We’ve got to do it!”

Durkin looked at her gloomily, still struggling with his own line of fruitless thought.

“Here, Jim, quick, take this and listen!” She placed the receiver close to his ear as she spoke. “Now, that’s Ottenheimer himself at the ’phone. Can you catch his voice distinctly? Well, do you notice what kind of voice it is—its timbre, I mean? A plaintive-toned, guttural, suave, mean, cringing sort of voice! Listen hard. He may not be at the ’phone again today. Is he still talking?”

“Yes, the old scoundrel. There, he’s finished!”

“What was it about?”

“Just kicking to some one down in Maiden Lane, because Judge Hazel, of the District Court, has overruled the board of appraisers and imposed a ten per cent. ad valorem duty on natural pearls coming in.”

“But his voice—Jim, you have got to learn to imitate that voice.”

“And then what?”

“Then cut in, presumably from Ottenheimer’s own house, and casually ask, say, Phipps, the second salesman, and head of the shipping department, just what your safe-combination happens to be. It has slipped your memory, you see?”

“And Phipps, naturally, in such a case, will ring up Central and verify the call.”

“Not necessarily. At the first call from him we shall cut his wire!”

“Which cuts us off, and gives us away, as soon as a special messenger can deliver a message and a lineman trace up the trouble.”

“Then why cut him off at all? If that’s too risky, should the worst come to the worst, we can tell Central it’s a case of crossed wires, bewilder her a bit, and then shut ourselves off.”

“I believe you’ve almost got it.”

“But can you get anywhere near that voice?”

“Listen, Frank; how’s this?”

He drew in his chin, half-laughingly, and throwing his voice into a whining yet businesslike guttural, spoke through an imaginary transmitter to an imaginary Phipps.

“That would never, never do!” cried the other, despairingly. “He’s a German Jew, if you have noticed—he sounds his w’s like w’s, and not like v’s, but he makes his r’s like w’s.”

“Oh, I have it,” broke in Durkin, from a silent contemplation of his desk-’phone. “We’ll just release the binding-posts on our transmitter a little, and, let’s say, keep the electrode-bearing a trifle slack—fix things up, I mean, so that any voice will sound as tinny as a phonograph—decompose it, so to speak. Then, if necessary, we can lay it to the fact that the wires are out of order somewhere!”

“Good, but when—when can we do it?”

Durkin paced the room with his old-time, restless, animal-like stride, while Frances readjusted her receiver and restlessly took her seat in the wicker rocker once more.

“This is Friday. That leaves Saturday night the only possible night for the—er—invasion. Then, you see, we get a whole day for a margin. First, we’ve got to find out exactly what time Ottenheimer himself leaves the place, and whether it’s Phipps, or some one else, who closes up, and just what time he does it.”

“They close at half-past five on Saturdays. Ottenheimer has already made an engagement for tomorrow, about five at the Astor, with an importer, to doctor up some invoice or other.”

“We could make that do; though, of course, any one in his office would be more likely to suspect a call from the Astor, being a public place. You must find out, definitely, this afternoon, just who it is closes up tomorrow. Then we must get hold of some little business detail or two, to fling in at him in case he has any suspicions.”

“That shouldn’t be so very difficult. Though I do wish you could get something nearer Ottenheimer’s voice!”

“I’ll have a rehearsal or two alone—though, I guess, we can muffle up that ’phone to suit our purpose. My last trouble now, is to find out how I’m going to get through those two doors without powder.”

Again he fell to pacing the little room with his abstracted stride, silently testing contingency after contingency, examining and rejecting the full gamut of possibilities. Sometimes he stood before the woman with the receiver, staring at her with vacant and unseeing eyes; at other times he paced between her and the window. Then he paused before the little green coils of wire that stretched across the room. He studied them with involuntary and childish movements of the head and hands. Then he suddenly stood erect, ran to the back window, and flung it open.

“My God, I’ve got it!” he cried, running back to where the woman still sat, listening, “I’ve got it!”

“How?” she asked, catching her breath.

“I’ve got to eat my way through what may be, for all I know, a full inch of Harveyized steel. I’ve got to burrow and work through it in some way, haven’t I? It has to be done quickly, too. I’ve got to have power, strong power.”

He stopped, suddenly, and seemed to be working out the unmastered details in his own mind, his eyes bent on a little shelf in one corner of the room.

“Have you ever seen an electric fan? You see this shelf, up here in the corner! Well, at one time, an electric fan stood there—see, here are the remnants of the wires. It stood there whirling away at five or six thousand revolutions to the minute, and with no more power than it takes to keep an ordinary office-lamp alight. Right at the back of this house is a wire, a power-circuit, alive with more than two hundred times that voltage, with power in plenty—a little condensed Niagara of power—asking to be taken off and made use of!”

“But what use?”

“I can capture and tame and control that power, Frank. I can make it my slave, and carry it along with me, almost in my pocket, on a mere thread of copper. I can make it a living, iron-eating otter, with a dozen fangs—in the shape of quarter-inch drills, gnawing and biting and eating through that armor-plate door about the same as a rat would gnaw through a wooden lath. Oh, we’ve got them, Frank! We’ve got them this time!”

“Not until we know that combination, though,” qualified the colder-thoughted woman in the wicker rocker, still not quite understanding how or in what the other had found so potent and so unexpected an ally. And while he leaned out of the window, studying the wire-distribution, she discreetly slipped her watch-case receiver over her head, in case anything of importance should be going through over the telephone.

In the paling afternoon, with a pearl-mist of fine rain thinly shrouding the city, Frances Candler waited for Durkin impatiently, with her watch open before her. As the frail steel hand, implacable as fate, sank away toward the half-hour mark, her own spirits sank with it. It was not often Durkin was late. Another ten minutes would make him forever too late. She debated within herself whether or not she should risk her own voice over the wire to Ottenheimer’s office, while there was yet time, or wait it out to the last. Then she remembered, to her sudden horror, that the transmitter still stood in its perfectly-adjusted and normal condition, that there could be no muffling, incompetent mechanism to disguise the tones of her voice.

She was still beating despairingly through a tangle of dubious possibilities when the reassuring two-three ring of the door-bell sounded out, through the quiet of the lonely twilight, with startling clearness. A minute later Durkin came panting into the room. He was clean-shaven, immaculate, and most painfully out-of-breath.

“Is there time?” he gasped, putting down a heavy suit-case and peeling off his coat as he spoke.

“It’s twenty-one minutes after five. If Phipps is punctual, that gives you only four minutes.”

By this time Durkin had the suit-case open. In another half-minute he had the casing off the transmitter. Then a deft turn or two with his screw-driver, a tentative touch or two on the electrode, and in another half minute the casing was restored, and he was gently tapping on the diaphragm of the transmitter, with the receiver at his ear, testing the sound.

“Just a minute, now, till I cool down, and get my breath! I had endless trouble getting my drill apparatus—at one time I thought I’d have to take a dentist’s tooth-driller, or some such thing. But I got what I wanted—that’s what kept me. Anything new?”

He turned with the receiver still at his ear, and for the first time looked at her closely. Her face seemed pale, and a little weary-looking, against her black street-gown; the shadowy wistfulness about her eyes seemed more marked than ever.

“Yes,” she was laughing back at him, however, “something most prodigious has happened. I have an order for one dozen cotillion-favors, to be done in velvet and crimson satin, and delivered next Saturday afternoon!”

Durkin himself laughed shortly, and faced the telephone once more, asking her how time was.

“You haven’t a second to lose!”

His own face was a little paler than usual as he stood before the transmitter, while Frances, with her watch in her hand, went on saying that, if Phipps was punctual, he would be out and away in one minute’s time.

Durkin took a last look around, said under his breath, “Well, here goes!” and placed the receiver to his ear.

For a moment the woman, watching him, with half-parted lips, was haunted by the sudden impression that she had lived through the scene before, that each move and sound were in some way second-hand to her inner consciousness, older than time itself, a blurred and dateless photograph on the plates of memory.

“Hello! Hello! Is that you, Phipps?” she heard him say, and his voice sounded thin and far-away. There was a pause—it seemed an endless pause—and he repeated the query, louder.

“This is Ottenheimer. Yes, something wrong with the ’phone. Don’t cable Teetzel—I say don’t cable Teetzel, about those canary diamonds, until you see me. Yes, Teetzel. Did you get that? Well,—er—what the devil’s our safe combination? Yes, yes, Ottenheimer!”

“Slower—slower, Jim!” groaned the girl, behind him.

“Combination’s slipped my mind, Phipps. Yes; after dinner; want to run down and look over the books. Louder, please; I can’t hear. Yes, that’s better. To the right three times, to seventy-four—back thirty—on eighty-two—back one hundred and eight—and on seven. Yes. It’s the second last figure slipped me. Better close up now. Better close up, I say. All right,—good-bye!”

The last minute vibration ebbed out of the transmitter’s tingling diaphragm; but still neither the listening man nor woman moved. They waited, tense, expectant, tossed between doubt and hope, knowing only too well that the questioning tinkle of a little polished, nickel bell would sound the signal of their absolute and irreparable defeat.

Second by second, a minute dragged itself away. Then another, and another, and still no call came from Ottenheimer’s office, for Central. The woman moved a little restlessly. The man sighed deeply. Then he slowly put down the receiver, and mopped his moist face and forehead.

“I think he’s safe,” half-whispered Durkin, with his eyes still on the transmitter.

“He may suspect any moment though—when he’s had time to think it over, especially.”

“I rather doubt it. Our voices were nothing but broken squeaks. But if he does ring up Central, we’ll have to risk it and jump in and claim a wire’s crossed somewhere.”

Then he repeated the strange formula: “To the right three times, to seventy-four—back thirty—on eighty-two—back one hundred and eight—and on seven. Can you get it down, Frank?”

She nodded, as she wrote it in pencil, on a slip of paper. This he placed in his waistcoat pocket, and mopped his face once more, laughing—perhaps a little hysterically, as he watched the ’phone and felt the passing minutes drip relievingly, like the softest of balm, on his strained nerves.

“And now what?” asked Frances, sharing his relief, as he went to the window, and breathed the fresh air that blew in through the low-ceilinged little studio.

“Now,” said Durkin, jubilantly, “now we begin our real work!” He opened his suit-case and handed her a heavy, cylindrical, steel implement. Into one end of this odd-looking tool he slipped and clamped a slender, polished little shaft of grooved steel.

“That’s what nearly lost me everything,” he continued, carefully unpacking, as he spoke, a condenser, a tangent galvanometer, a pair of lineman’s-gloves, a Warner pocket battery-gauge, a pair of electrician’s scissors and pliers, two or three coils of wire, a half-a-dozen pony glass insulators, and a handful or two of smaller tools.

“Here, you see, is what I set up business with,” he soliloquized, as he studied the litter they made on the floor. He looked up quickly, as she drew her little table out from the wall and lifted the transmitter up on the empty electric-fan shelf. “Er—before I forget it,” he said, absently, his eyes still on his widely strewn apparatus, “have you got everything you want away from here?”

She had; though she hated to leave her show-case, she said. Some day she might like to take up fancy sewing again. “But before we do another thing,” she insisted, “we ought to have dinner. Breakfast, this morning, was our last meal, I know!”

And to his utter astonishment, Durkin remembered that he was famished.

It was a hurried and humble little meal they ate together in the failing light,—a meal of sandwiches washed down with bottled milk. Their thoughts as they ate, however, were on other things, grappling with impending problems, wondering when and under what circumstances their next meal would be eaten, almost glorying in the very uncertainty of their future, tingling with the consciousness of the trial they were to undergo, of the hazard they essayed. Then Durkin, as he smoked, laid out his final plan of action, point by premeditated point.

At twenty minutes to eleven, slipping off his shoes, Durkin climbed cautiously through the transom opening out on the roof. Creeping as carefully from chimney tier to chimney tier, he found himself face to face with a roof-fence of sharpened iron rods. He counted down this fence to the eighteenth rod, then carefully lifted on it. The lead that sealed it in the lower cross-piece, and into the stone beneath that again, had been strangely fused away, and the loosened rod slid up through the top horizontal bar very much like a miniature portcullis. Squeezing through this narrow opening, he carefully replaced the rod behind him. With a flattened piece of steel, once used for a furnace poker, and looking very much like a gigantic tack-drawer, he slowly and gently forced the bolt that held shut the transom on the Ottenheimer building. This he replaced, after passing through, paying out with him as he went, two coils of rubber-coated wire, in appearance not unlike a large size of incandescent lamp cord.

From the photographer’s studio in which he found himself, nothing but a draw-bolt kept him from an outside hallway. Making sure that the building was deserted, and everything safe, he worked his way slowly down, like a diver, stair by stair, to the basement. Here he made a careful study of the little tunnel of electric wires at the back of the lower hall, probing, testing, measuring, and finally, with cool deliberation, “bridging” the necessary portion of the burglar-alarm connection, which he knew to be operated on a closed circuit. This circuit he diverted as a miner diverts a troublesome stream. Then, holding before him his little two-candle incandescent lamp, scarcely bigger than his thumb nail, he groped toward the iron covered door that divided one-half of the building from the other.

Here he directed his thin shaft of light into the crack between the heavy door and its studding, and his squinting eyes made out the iron lock-bar that held him out. From his vest pocket, where they stood in a row like glimmering pencils, he took out one of the slim steel drills, adjusted it noiselessly in the drill-flange, and snapped shut his switch. There was the quick spit of a blue spark, and of a sudden, the inanimate thing of steel throbbed and sang and quivered with mysterious life. As he glanced down at it, in its fierce revolutions, he realized that once more he had for an accomplice that old-time silent, and ever-ready assistant which for years had been a well-tested and faithful friend. The mere companionship with so familiar a force brought back to him his waning confidence.

He forced the whirling drill through the door-crack and in against the bar. It ate through the soft iron as though it had been a bar of cheese. Eight carefully placed perforations, side by side, had severed the end of the lockshaft. He shut off the current, confidently, and swung open the heavy door. The falling piece of iron made a little tinkle of sound on the cement flooring, then all was silence again. He had at least, he told himself, captured the enemy’s outposts.

Cautiously he felt his way across the warm cellar, up the steps, and at last faced his one definite barrier, the door of solid steel, abutted by even more solid masonry. The builders of that door had done their best to make it forbidding to men of his turn of mind, Durkin ruminated, as he felt and sounded and tested despondently over its taciturn painted surface.

He studied the hinges carefully, through his tiny lamp. They were impregnable. As he had surmised, his only way was to cut out, inch by inch, the three heavy steel shafts, or bolt-bars, which slipped and fitted into steel casings also, apparently, embedded in solid masonry.

Adjusting his drill, he closed the switch once more, and, bracing the instrument’s head against his breast-bone, watched the slender, humming, spinning shaft bite and grind and burrow its way into the slowly yielding bar. From a little pocket-can, every minute or two, he squirted kerosene in on the drill-tip. The pungent smell of the scorching oil, as it spread on the heated steel, rose almost suffocatingly to his nostrils in the furnace-heated warmth of the cellar and for weeks afterwards remained an indistinct and odious memory to him.

When his first hole was bored, and his little drill raced wildly through into space, like the screw of a liner on the crest of a wave, he started a second, close beside the first; then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, slowly honeycombing the thick steel with his minute excavations. Sometimes a drill would snap off short, and he would have to draw a fresh one from his stock. Sometimes it did not bite sharply, and he tried another. And still he stood drilling, directing the power of his silent, insidious, untiring accomplice, whose spirit crooned and burned and sighed itself out through the wire at his feet.

As he worked, he lost all track of time; after he had started what he knew to be the last hole, he stopped and looked at his watch, as casually as he had done often enough after a night of operating the key in a despatcher’s office. To his horror, he saw that it had stopped, stunned with a natural enough electrolytic paralysis. It might not yet be twelve, or it might be four in the morning; time, from the moment he had taken off his shoes in Frances Candler’s little back room, had been annihilated to him. He wondered, in sudden alarm, if she were still maintaining her patrol outside, up and down the block. He wondered, too, as he drove the little drill home for the last time, and cautiously pried open the great, heavy door, if she had sent any signal in from the street front, and he had missed it. He even wondered, quakingly, if daylight would not overtake them at their work—when his startled eyes, chancing to fall on a nearby clock-dial, saw that the hour was only twenty-five minutes to twelve.

Step by step he crept back to the inner offices, followed by the murmurous ticking of a dozen noisy clocks, declaiming his presence. From the door in front of where the safe stood, gloomy, ominous, impregnable-looking, he lifted a seemingly innocent rubber mat. As he thought, it had been attached to a burglar-alarm apparatus. Dropping on one knee, he repeated his formula, number by number, each time listening for the telltale click of the falling ward. Then, turning the nickel lock-knob, he heard the many-barred lock chuck back into place.

The next moment the ponderous doors were open, and Durkin’s little thumb-nail electric lamp was exploring the tiers of inner compartments.

He still carried his drill with him; and, once he had found the private drawer he wanted, the softer iron of the inner fittings offered little resistance to a brutally impatient one-eighth bit. After two minutes of feverish work, he was able to insert the point of his furnace poker into the drawer, and firmly but gently pry it open.

The next moment his blackened and oily fingers were rummaging carelessly through a fortune or two of unset stones—through little trays of different tinted diamonds, through crowded little cases of Ceylon pearls and Uralian emeralds. At last, in a smaller compartment, marked “I. Ottenheimer,” he found a gun-metal case sealed up in an envelope. The case itself, however, was securely locked. Durkin hesitated for one half second; then he forced the lid open with his steel screw-driver.

One look was enough. It held the Blue Pear.

He stooped and carefully brushed up the steel cuttings under his shoeless feet. As carefully he closed the inner drawers of the safe. His hand was on the nickel lock-knob once more, to swing the ponderous outer doors shut, when a sound fell on his ears, a sound that made his very blood chill and tingle and chill again through all his tense body.

It was Frank’s voice, outside the same building in which he stood, not a hundred feet away from him, her voice shrilly screaming for help.

His first mad impulse was to rush out to her, blindly. A second precautionary flash of thought kept him rooted to the spot, where he stood listening. He could hear confused, sharp voices, and the scuffling of feet. He heard the quick scream again; then guttural, angry protests. Some subliminal prompting told Durkin that that scream was not one of terror, but of warning.

Snapping out his incandescent lamp, he stole cautiously forward through the row of partitioned, heavily-carpeted little offices, and, without showing himself, peered toward the shop-front. As he did so, a second involuntary thrill of apprehension sped up and down his backbone. The street-door itself was open. Already half way in through that door was a dark, stoutly-built man. He stood struggling in the arms of a determined young woman. That woman, Durkin could see, was Frances Candler. And all the while that she was clinging to him and holding him she was crying lustily for help.

The next moment Durkin made out the man. It was Ottenheimer, himself. For some unknown reason, he hastily surmised, the diamond merchant had intended to drop into his own office. But why, he still asked, was Frank taking such risks?

Durkin did not try to work the thing out in its minute details. Like a flash, he darted back to the open safe. He swung the big doors to, locked them, caught up his drill, and the loose strands of wire, and then backed quickly out through the steel door, securing it with a deft twist or two of a piece of his number twelve. The outer cellar door he as quickly closed after him.

Then he flew upstairs, two steps at a time, rebolted the photographers’ hall door, replaced the transom as he swung up through it, and as hurriedly refitted the loose iron bar in the roof-fencing.

Three minutes later, a well-dressed gentleman, wearing a black hat and carrying a large leather suit-case, stopped, with a not unnatural curiosity, on his way up Fifth Avenue, to inquire the meaning of an excited little crowd that clustered about two policemen and a woman in the doorway of Ottenheimer & Company.

He drew up, casually enough, and listened while a short, stout, and very indignant man spluttered and gesticulated and angrily demanded how any one should dare to stop him from going into his own store. He was the owner of the place—there was his own watchman to identify him,—and somebody would be “broke” for this tomfoolery, he declared, with a shake of the fist toward the silent sergeant beside him.

The young woman, who chanced to be veiled, explained in her well-modulated, rich contralto voice that the hour had seemed so unusual, the store had looked so dark inside, even the burglar-alarm, she stubbornly insisted, had rung so loudly, that, naturally, it had made her suspicious. She was sorry if it was a mistake. But now the officers were there; they could attend to it—if some one would kindly call a taxi for her.

The sergeant between her and Ottenheimer agreed with her, and stepping out and stopping an empty motor-cab on its way up the Avenue, turned back to the still enraged owner of the store and solicitously advised him to go home and cool down.

“You hold that woman!” demanded Ottenheimer, husky with rage. “You hold that woman, until I examine these premises!”

The young woman, obviously, and also quite naturally, objected to being held. There was a moment of puzzled silence, and then a murmur of disapproval from the crowd, for about the carefully gloved girl in the black street-gown and plumed hat clung that nameless touch of birth and bearing which marked her as a person who would be more at home in a limousine than in a wind-swept doorway.

“The lady, of course, will wait!” quietly but deliberately suggested the black-hatted man with the suit-case, looking casually in over the circling crowd of heads.

The sergeant turned, sharply, glaring out his sudden irritability.

“Now, who asked you to butt in on this?” he demanded, as he impatiently elbowed the pressing crowd further out into a wider circle.

“I merely suggested that the lady wait,” repeated the man in the black hat, as unperturbed as before.

“Of course, officer, I shall wait, willingly,” said the girl, hurriedly, in her equally confident, low-noted rich contralto. She drew her skirts about her, femininely, merely asking that the shop-owner might make his search as quickly as possible.

Ottenheimer and the doubtful-minded sergeant disappeared into the gloom of the midnight store. As the whole floor flowered into sudden electric luminousness, Durkin thanked his stars that he had had sense enough to leave the lighting wires intact.

“Everything’s all right; you may go, miss,” said the sergeant, two minutes later. “I guess old Isaac’s had an early nightmare!” And the dispersing crowd laughed sympathetically.

The woman stepped into the motor-cab, and turned toward Broadway.

Safely round the corner, she picked up the waiting Durkin.

“That was a close one—but we win!” he murmured jubilantly.

“You’ve got it?”

“I’ve got it,” he exulted.

The woman at his side, for some vague reason, could not share in his joy. Intuitively, in that moment of exhaustion, she felt that their triumph, at the most, was a mere conspiracy of indifference on the part of a timeless and relentless destiny. And in the darkness of the carriage she put her ineffectual arms about Durkin, passionately, as though such momentary guardianship might shield him for all time to come.

She shook her abstractedness from her, with a long and fluttering sigh.

“Jim,” she asked him, unexpectedly, “how much money have you?”

He told her, as nearly as he could. “It’s hanged little, you see!” he added, not understanding the new anxiety that was eating at her heart,—“but I’ve been thinking of a plan!”

“Oh, what now?” she asked miserably, out of her weariness.

She knew, well enough, the necessity of keeping up, of maintaining both activity and appearances. She knew that wrong-doing such as theirs, when without even its mockery of respectability and its ironical touch of dignity, was loathsome to both the eye and the soul. But she found that there were moods and times, occurring now more and more frequently, when she dreaded each return to that subterranean and fear-haunted world. She dreaded it now, not so much for herself, as for Durkin; and as he briefly told her of his plan, this feeling grew stronger within her.

“Then if it must be done,” she cried, “let me do the worst part of it!”

He looked at her, puzzled, not comprehending the source of her passionate cry, blindly wondering if her over-adventurous life was not getting a deeper and deeper hold on her. But her next question put him to shame.

“Jim, if I help you in this, if I do all that has to be done, will you promise me that you will make it bring you closer to your work on your amplifier, and your transmitting camera? Can’t you promise to get back to that decent work once more?”

“I’ll promise, if you’ll make me one promise in return,” said Durkin, after a moment of silent thought.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Will you let me hold over this Singford stone, for a few weeks?”

“But why?” she asked, aghast.

“To oil the curtain that has to go up on our next act!” he answered, grimly. “I mean a few hundred, now, would make things so simple again.”

“No,” she protested fiercely, “it must not, it shall not, be done. The Blue Pear must go back to London tomorrow!”

“It will mean some hard work for us both, then.”

“I can’t help that, Jim. We’ll have to face it together. But this stone is a thing we can’t trifle with, or equivocate over. I should hate myself, I should even hate you, if I thought it wasn’t to go back to London, by express, tomorrow morning!”

“Then back it goes!” said the man at her side. He could see, even in the dim light of the taxi, the rebellious and wounded look that had crept into her face.

“Whatever it brought me, I couldn’t endure your hate!” he said, taking her hand in his.