Under the stimulus of a particularly good gift cigar the man behind the register grew more confidential. Miss Geddis had always impressed him as being a woman with a history. It was not generally known, he said, but there was a whisper that she had come perilously near getting herself dragged into the lime-light as co-respondent in a certain high-life divorce case. The clerk did not vouch for this, but he did know that she had been seen often and openly in public with the man in the case, since the granting of the divorce. I didn't sleep very well that night, as may be imagined; and the following day I should certainly have taken the first train for Cripple Creek if business had permitted. But business would not permit. There was an accumulated difference of some fifteen thousand dollars in ore values between us and the smelter people, and I was obliged to stay on with Barrett and help wrangle for our side in the discrepancy dispute. At dinner time that evening I managed to elude Barrett, and upon going to the lobby desk for my mail, found a violet-scented envelope addressed to "Mr. James Bertrand" in a handwriting that I remembered only too well. To anyone looking over my shoulder the enclosed note might have read as a casual and friendly greeting from an old acquaintance. But for me it spelled out death and destruction. "Dear 'Bert," it ran. "I am not going to scold you for not speaking to me last night in the mezzanine parlor; nor for changing your name; nor for growing a beard. But if you should call this evening between eight and nine at Mrs. Altberg's house on the Boulevard, you will find me at home and more than willing to listen to your apologies and explanations. "AGATHA." My appetite for dinner had gone glimmering when I sat at the most secluded table the cafe afforded and went through the motions of eating. Not for a single instant did I mistake the purport of Agatha Geddis's note. It was not a friendly invitation; it was a veiled command. If it should be disobeyed, I made sure that not all the money in the Little Clean-Up's treasury could save me from going back to the home State as a recaptured felon. Eight o'clock found me descending from a cab at the door of a rather dissipated looking mansion in the northern suburb. A servant admitted me, but I had to wait alone for a quarter of an hour or more in the stuffy and rather tawdry luxury of a great drawing-room. After a time I realized that Agatha was making me wait purposely in a refinement of cruelty, knowing well what torments I must be enduring. When the suspense ended and she came into the room I saw at a glance that she was the same woman as of old; beautiful, alluring, but infinitely more sophisticated. Her charm now, as in girlhood, was chiefly the charm of physical perfection; but it was not entirely without its appeal when she made me sit beside her on the heavily carved mock-antique sofa.