"Yes," answered the husband absently, and then as one who would plunge ahead, began: "By the by--why don't you have your father and mother and some of the neighbors over to play cards some evening--and what's the matter with the Fenns? Henry's kind of down on his luck, and I'll need him in my next campaign, and I thought if we could have them over some evening--well, what's the matter with to-morrow evening? They'd enjoy it. You know Mrs. Fenn--I saw her down town this morning, and George Brotherton says Henry's slipping back to his old ways. And I just thought perhaps--" But she knew as well as he what he "thought perhaps," and a cloud trailed over her face. When Thomas Van Dorn left his home that night, striding into the lights of Market Street, his heart was hot with the glowing coals of an old wrong revived. For to Judge Van Dorn, home had become a trap, and the glorious eyes that had beamed upon him in the morning seemed beacons of liberty. As gradually those eyes became fixed in his consciousness, through days and weeks and months, a mounting passion for Margaret Fenn kindled in his heart. And slowly he went stone-blind mad. The whole of his world was turned over. Every ambition, every hope, every desire he ever had known was burned out before this passion that was too deep for desire. Whatever lust was in his blood in those first months of his madness grew pale. It seemed to the man who went stalking down the street past her house night after night that the one great, unselfish passion of his life was upon him, loosening the roots of his being, so that any sacrifice he could make, whether of himself or of any one or anything about him, would give him infinite joy. When he met Henry Fenn, Van Dorn was always tempted and often yielded to the temptation to rush up to Fenn with some foolish question that made the sad-eyed man stare and wonder. But just to be that near to her for the moment pleased him. There was no jealousy for Fenn in Van Dorn's heart; there was only a dog-like infatuation that had swept him away from his reason and seated a fatuous, chattering, impotent, lecherous ape where his intellect should have been. And he knew he was a fool. He knew that he was stark mad. Yet what he did not know was that this madness was a culmination, not a pristine passion new born in his heart. For the maggot in his brain had eaten out a rotten place wherein was the memory of many women's yieldings, of many women's tears. One side of his brain worked with rare cunning. He wound the evidence against the men in the mine, taken at the coroner's hearing, through the labyrinth of the law, and snared them tightly in it. That part of his brain clicked with automatic precision. But sitting beside him was the ape, grinning, leering, ready to rise and master him. So many a night when he was weary, he lay on the couch beside his desk, and the ape came and howled him to a troubled sleep.