The while, Seff gained considerable reassurance from a _sotto voce_ consultation with his forewoman who, in the emergency, seemed to have reversed the usual relationship of employed to employer. He greeted the officers as though they had come at his request and asked that they search the store for the model. She, although the cause of the disturbance, would be needed, he declared, as his chief witness. Upon the report that no trace of her could be found, he addressed himself to the financier with a noticeable cessation of resentment. The girl was gone, he pointed. That fact was substantial evidence of her guilty intent toward himself. No real harm had been done and nothing would be gained by going through with his arrest on a charge that could not be proved. Certainly, with their combined influence, the unpleasant aftermath of what so many had voted a pleasant morning could be kept from the papers. Had Mr. Cabot no thought for the consequence of the use of his name in such a connection? Even though he cared nothing for his own reputation, did he not owe something to his family? Sentiment aside, with no complaining witness what could he gain to equal what he should lose by carrying out his threat? “But there is a complainant,” John assured him pleasantly enough. “That rôle is mine.” “_You?_ Can you possibly intend----” Mrs. Hutton it was who found voice for direct demand. “What is the charge? We have a right to know, sir.” “Assault.” John Cabot directly faced the shopman. Humor twitched his mouth as he asked: “Did you think I let you hit me for my own selfish pleasure?” As the motor patrol purred its way to the station house, however, the amusement faded from his face. The Fall air whipped his longing for the gentler zephyrs of Spring, for the breath of apple-blooms, for the sound of a flute playing Mendelssohn’s vaguely passionate theme. He forced himself back to certain troubleful questions of the moment. The manikin, Dolores Trent--what of her? The very strength of his desire to find her advised that he should not look for her. Why favor himself as a trailer, while jailing Seff? But where would she hide herself--what do? CHAPTER VII Morning in a land of endless twilight! The spirit-girl lay late abed after that first awakening in Gehenna, as she realized with the switching off of the mauve curtains which had shut sunrise from her chamber. On her show of weariness after last night’s ordeal, she had been told how King Satan, after his preference for the customs of Earth, had time apportioned into periods of day and night, with eventide and dawn, midnight and noon exactly fixed. By means of his electric sun, moon and attendant stars, supplied from the power accumulators on the eastern and western fringes of the Gehennan desert, the semi-light shed from the eternal radiance of the Elysian Fields was made to seem negligible.