Gruin shivered a little in the big leather chair in the luxurious lounge. Murder is a large order, even when you're as sure you can get away with it as Gruin was. In addition, there was a dim realization in the back of his mind that the Josés, father and daughter, were not quite as other people were. There was something a little--well, mystic--in their vital black eyes. The one time when Gruin had consented indifferently to meet Maria's father they had come upon him in the back room of his solitary sweatshop, talking. Talking--with no one else in the room. Talking to her mother, his dead wife, Maria had explained seriously, afterward. And in the man's deep-set eyes had been a flame that killed laughter on Gruin's lips. Something in the spirit and soul of the Josés, father and daughter, that set them a little apart from others--something mystic and unknown.... "Hell," said Gruin, finishing his cocktail and grimacing contemptuously at himself. He was a fool. He was imagining things. Maria was just a girl--a woman whose ardent infatuation had grown to the point where it threatened a fortune he was to inherit, and his whole future life and good name. He could imagine his grandfather's disinheritance speech if he presented the mercurial cobbler's daughter in the gaudy red heels as his wife! "It's my life or hers," Gruin told himself, to stifle the gray fear of murder--even so easy and fool-proof a murder as he had in mind. And with the gray fear lulled by what he chose to call the inevitable, he had dinner at the club and then went to meet Maria.... He met her at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street at a little after half-past eight. She clicked over the sidewalk in her red heels to the curb, glowing and beautiful in a squirrel coat which he had indiscreetly called an "engagement" present when he offered it--because otherwise she would not have accepted it. "Eldon! My darling! You are late. I have waited and waited." "I said, eight-thirty," Gruin mumbled. "I did not want to wait that long. I could not. I have been here since before eight.... Sweetheart, you haven't said you love me...." Gruin opened the door of his roadster and she got in. "Eldon, this waiting and waiting--I cannot understand it. When are we going to--to stand before Father Mollé, so I will be with you always?" "Very soon," Gruin said, sliding into gear. "You will not have to wait for me ever again." Up Riverside Drive they went, across the Hudson and up the Palisades, to a place where they had parked often at night during the spring and summer and fall--a place that had given Gruin courage to do murder by simplifying it.