vast,--birth, life, death, so real and yet so unreal, actualities and yet but fancies, and only fixed and certain Fate, God, Eternity-- She gasped suddenly for breath and opened her eyes with a little start of fear. The clock on the mantel struck ten. With a quick gesture of disappointment she rose. "I'm sure he said to-night," she murmured, "well, he'll explain about it to-morrow." Then she snatched Palmer's picture from its place and pressed it to her lips. "Life is so beautiful, dear," she whispered softly, "and all because I love you and you love me." Over across the city, far away to the northeast, on a quiet side street near Bradfield's was Annie Holton's tiny flat. To find its occupant at home at nine o'clock in the evening was a rare occurrence, but on this particular night, for perhaps the first time in a fortnight, she had not gone to Bradfield's, but sat alone in front of the fire, whose leaping flames furnished the only light in the little room. She, too, was busy with her thoughts. It was not often that a thing as big as this came her way. Sheer luck it had been from the first. A suspicion that her mother had been a little over eager in urging her to go on the motor trip with the warm hearted western millionaire, a suspicion confirmed on her return by a chance word incautiously let fall; then her unlooked-for good fortune in getting the old woman gloriously drunk, and finally the startling discovery of the whole story, and her instant visit to Harry Palmer. With him, too, it had been touch and go. What if she had not been able to persuade him to listen; what if she had failed to convince him of the truth of her story? Gordon's game had been a good one. In spite of her desire for revenge, she felt a fierce admiration for his cleverness; just that one flaw, the picking of Mrs. Holton for one of his helpers, risking the taking on of a woman once notorious as a drunkard, and still given to occasional lapses. That one fact had meant Gordon's defeat and her own salvation. [Illustration: Rose] The struggle between her old infatuation for Gordon, and her hatred of Rose Ashton had been bitter, but brief. Hatred had triumphed, and yet to-night her exultation meant regret as well. The thought of holding Rose in her power made her clench her shapely hands, and brought a tigerish gleam to her bold black eyes, and still the afterthought would come that it was Gordon, after all, who would suffer most. Gordon was the one man she had ever cared the snap of her fingers for, and to harm him--and yet, since she had had the bitterness of seeing him desert her for Rose, there was a fierce pleasure in knowing that she would be sending him where she would never again know the agony of seeing him under the spell of the girl she loathed with all her heart.