“You were not supposed to understand. There has been a big, careful, subtle plan,--a plot devised by Peter Loveman,--and you, without knowing it, were to have been the goat!” “Oh, I say now, Bob!” protested Loveman; “you’re talking like a melodrama. Why should I plot against Mary?” “Why? Listen to your own words--you know whom you said them to.” And Clifford quoted, driving his words savagely at Loveman: “‘Say, but this is one hell of a situation! Here I went into a game to clean up in three or four directions, relying chiefly on the criminal instincts of a clever girl to see the game through--and, damn it, if the girl hasn’t turned straight on me! Or, if she is playing a crooked game, she’s trying to play it straight. And the original game is no good now--is sure to fail. I want her to quit it, and come in on some other big proposition; but she won’t quit it--she still dreams she can put it over. And if I openly block her, she’ll blow on herself and me, and break with me, and that’ll end everything. How’s that for a hell of a fix!’ Remember saying that, Loveman?” Loveman had paled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “And remember saying this, Loveman?” Clifford drove at him: “‘I’ve got to have Mary Regan with us. But the only way out of this mess is to handle affairs so as to make her believe, from her own experience, that she can’t succeed in her respectable game--then she’ll come around to our way of thinking, and she’ll try to clean up with us. And there’s only one way to reach her--and that’s through Jack Morton.’” Clifford turned sharply upon Mary. “Isn’t it clear to you now?--Jack’s disappearance and all the rest? Loveman was determined your plan with Jack Morton should not go ahead. Since he didn’t dare openly oppose you, he concluded that the best scheme to defeat you would be to get hold of Jack and handle him so that he would give himself over completely to dissipation--that would show you how hopeless your plan was, and you’d drop it. You’ve been framed, and Jack’s been framed; and this wine party in here was part of the frame-up; and Loveman’s letting you have a glimpse, as if by chance, of Jack in here, a hopeless _débauché_, was to have been the clinching argument that would make you give up and join in with him.” “Clifford,” blustered Loveman, “everything you have just said is a lie!--and Mary knows it.”