The woman gave a cry of terror and bolted through the door into the adjacent room. Madeleine would have followed her, but the man stepped between them and seized the girl by the wrists. He was a big, showy fellow, in the forties, in evening dress, very well groomed, with sleek dark hair and a dark moustache. “Stop that, d’you hear?” he commanded. He spoke with a marked foreign accent. Furiously the girl wrenched herself free, “I’m sick of it all!” she cried. “Sick of being trifled with. Do you understand? Haven’t I lowered myself to the dirt for you? Haven’t I acted the part of a common prostitute to help you, and this is all the reward I get? . . .” The man looked apprehensively at Desmond. “Come, come,” he said to Madeleine in a voice that was intended to be persuasive; “don’t make a scene in front of our friend here! It was—ha, ha—only a joke of mine—to make you jealous, little woman . . .” “Lies, lies, always lies!” the girl burst in. “But I’m through with you now. Do you understand? You’re welcome to your Lotties and your Nancys and your painted French women! I do no more dirty work for you after this!” The man bit his moustache. His eyes were very evil. He controlled himself with an effort. “Dirty work?” he said. “What a horrid word, Mado! Come, now, take your cloak off! I’m sure our friend wants a game . . .” But the girl would not be pacified. “Horrid word, is it? Then what became of the other I brought here for you?” The man’s face darkened horribly. “That’s enough. Do you hear?” he cried, and clapped his hand over the girl’s mouth. But, with a fierce effort wrenching herself free: “Go, go!” she cried to Desmond. “For the love of God, get out of this house! If you don’t . . .” But her voice died away on a stifled scream. Two men in evening dress had suddenly appeared, and, lifting her bodily up, bore her struggling away up a stair that curved upward from the end of the hall. Desmond, springing instinctively forward to her aid, found his way blocked by Paul. Behind him, in the doorway leading off the vestibule, against a background of dim green light, sullen and forbidding faces now scowled. And a burly, thick-set man in a dinner coat, with a broken nose, had quietly posted himself between Desmond and the door. “Miss McKenzie,” said Paul suavely, “is subject to these _crises de nerfs_. I must apologize for the disturbance, Mr. . . . Mr. . . .” “Murchison!” said Desmond abstractedly. He was wondering whether he had alarmed himself unnecessarily. It was not the first time he had been in a London gaming-hell, and the curious muted hush beneath the green-shaded lamps of the room off the lobby was as familiar to him as the dim figures he could descry about the table watching with painful intensity the measured movements of the banker as he drew the cards from the shoe. Perhaps the scene he had just witnessed was merely one of the habitual encounters between a bully and his victims.