There was a thin yellow envelope which was familiar to the members of the Alpha Triangle, for it was in such envelopes that they received their weekly general orders, and in similar envelopes the lieutenants of the Apex communicated with their Chief, under one or another of his various aliases. It was one of these which caught the eye of Joan Sands on a certain morning when she entered the living-room for her belated breakfast. It lay beside her husband's plate unopened, for James Mattock was absorbed in the latest news about the Alpha Triangle, as purveyed by the _Daily Mercury_, and seemed to be unattached for the moment by the more intimate news which awaited his scrutiny. He glanced up as she came in, gave her a perfunctory smile, and went on with his reading. Joan took her seat and poured herself out some coffee. There were unbecoming shadows under her eyes; and, not yet rouged and powdered, she was unhealthily pale. The girl had altered during the past week, and Mattock had noticed the change without understanding it. There had never been any love between them--the old sophisticated Joan would have scoffed at the idea--but there had been Mattock's infatuation and the girl's readiness to accept anything that offered in the shape of easy money and a good time. He had done much for her--had served a term of imprisonment to save her life--and she was grateful. But love ... no. She was a gold-digger, and she was honest about it; she played the game by him, because her own peculiar code commanded her to. She would have given him what he wanted without the formality of marriage, because she was fond of him in a cynical way, and he had been very good to her in his unworldly, altruistic manner. Not that she was in any sense promiscuous; that was about the only form of gold-digging she barred, and that fact, perhaps, constituted her only virtue in the eyes of her victims. It is difficult to analyse her mind. A child of the people, she had risen to the fringe of Society by reason of her beauty, wit, vivacity, and a certain acquired refinement, while her less gifted brother remained in the ranks of the petty in-and-out-of-"stir" sneak-thieves. She kept up her position because she was unscrupulous where money was concerned. And yet, incredible as it may seem, for all the wealth her foolish middle-aged admirers had offered her, she had come to James Mattock a virgin. So ill-assorted a couple were they--James Mattock, Oxford graduate and gentleman by birth, who had in his headlong course down-hill tasted all but the ultimate dregs of dissipation, unselfishly in love with a woman of the criminal classes whose chastity had been her only claim to his consideration....