It occurred to me there in the dark in reference to the normals on the other side of the door. They looked all right; but they showed signs of an education decidedly deficient on inhibitions, and altogether too prodigal at translating dark thoughts and impulses into action. I wondered about Jerry and how much he might be knowing of my present position; twice, recently, you remember, I’d had word from him. I did the drowning-man acts,--both of them; I caught at the straw that somehow he might save me, and I reviewed, if not my entire life, yet several significant epochs of it; and I got to thinking about Doris. She was in with the worst, I was now sure; she not only had had me hit on the head, when I came to see her, but she’d worked in that scheme to gas Sencort and his guests. I kept thinking about her and the dances we’d had together at the Flamingo Feather and our dinner on the train when I’d had the best time ever in my life. Meanwhile I was listening and I began to realize that there was a soft, regular sound separate from and nearer than those which reached me through the door. It was the zephyr of breath. Some one was in the closet with me. “Hello,” I whispered. “Who’s here?” A hand touched my side and I seized it,--a small, firm hand mighty like Doris’s. “Hello; who’re you?” I asked. “Hello, Steve,” she said. “Doris! By Christopher, Doris!” “Anybody else in here?” I asked. That sounds stupider now than at the time; for after this, I was ready for anything. “No,” she said. “What’re you doing here?” I asked her; and she said, “What d’you suppose?” That was it; what did I suppose? Here she was with me. I was there because I’d run down and showed Teverson those slotted pipes and spoiled the best of Keeban’s schemes. Now why should she be here except for the same reason? “They saw you down on Wall Street,” I said. “Yes.” “I see,” I whispered. “Do you?” she asked me. I bent at the same time that my hands, which had been holding hers, felt up her arms, over her shoulders and located her cheeks. I held her between my hands and, bending, kissed her. On the lips, it was; I found them fair. She helped, perhaps, a little. “How long you been here,” I asked her, my lips burning like flame; and how I liked it! “What time is it?” she asked. “’Bout five when they shoved me in.” “I came at three.” I kissed her again at that; I was still bending and had her cheeks between my hands. “How’d they get you? You take a cab?” “That’s how they got you?” “Me,” I said. “But you--you weren’t so easy, were you?” “Oh, I don’t know,” she temporized. Queer--wasn’t that--how she wanted to show consideration for me? “I should have told you,” she blamed herself, “that they’d be watching the Sencort building, and when they bumped off just guinea pigs, they’d lay for who fooled ’em.” “I had a tip to skip out,” I said. “But I didn’t start in time. Where did they get you?” Now she told me, “They took me out of my room by the back way.”