“I’ll follow you up soon, see her, and then go and have him stowed away. I will bring the paper up to her myself. Hurry now, for God’s sake! I’ll take Helms and that French devil away later. Tell her not to breathe a word to a living soul. I am acting outside of the law. “Any one of the stolen letters that we found with Helms will do to convict him with. I’ve got one here to show up,” mused Daly, “and now the three wretches up there will all be eager to confess. It only remains to nab that scoundrel Alberg, and to face him with the returned Wilmot woman. It’s nearly all over. My God! What’s that?” Dan Daly sprang back into the main room, pistol in hand, as a deafening explosion rang out. His eyes rested on a body lying at his feet. “How did this happen?” he yelled, as one of the detectives excitedly knelt over Harold Vreeland lying there dying on the floor. The last words came faintly to Vreeland’s trembling lips, flecked with a bloody froth: “Justine, poor girl, tell her—money—oh, God!—water!—water!”—muttered the dying man, as his head fell back. He lay there, the man of art and graces—the man who had played out the lone hand in Life—dead at their feet, with the steel bands still upon his pulseless wrists. It was a barren victory! “It was all done quick as a flash, Dan!” whispered the disgraced detective. “He was seemingly docile, and asked me for a drink of water as you went out. I turned to get it. He had seen me put back my pistol. “With his handcuffed hands he swiftly plucked it out, then one touch of the trigger, and there he lies.” “It is the will of God,” said Daly, gravely. “There’ll be no newspaper scandal and public exposure now. He has gone before the higher court. Wait here. Let no one enter. We must call it a drink suicide.” Daly leaped away like a leopard on the chase to be the first to seal Mrs. Willoughby’s lips forever as to this happening, and to hand over the document which had cost the dead scoundrel his life. With grave faces, the detectives watched the stiffening form upon the floor. The “rising star” had set forever! Only the silent, weeping, widowed woman at the Hotel Savoy knew the whirlwind of baffled hate which had filled Vreeland’s wretched breast as he staggered away from his wife’s rooms that morning. Their quarrel had been the unveiling of an unpunished crime—a tangle of sin and shame. For smarting under the loss of a “financial backer” who could not refuse him money advances, Vreeland had faced his wife with the direct query, so long withheld, as to her separate property. “You must now aid me with your cash, money, property or whatever else you have. Garston’s death leaves me without a friend.” Standing among the scattered pyramids of fashion’s evening uniforms, Katharine Vreeland turned her bright, defiant eyes upon the half-insane speculator. How she despised him in her guilty heart!