In these days men took a bath morning and evening, ate daintily, had a refined vocabulary to use on demand, dressed in tweeds instead of velvet. There were longer intervals between the old style of warfare when men were always plugging one another full of holes in the name of religion or disputed territory, merely to amuse themselves with a tryout of Right against Might, or to gratify the insane ambition of some upstart like Napoleon. To-day the business world was the battlefield, and it was his capital a man was always healing, his poor brain that collapsed nightly after the strain and nervous worry of the day. It suddenly felt quite normal to be here flattened against a wall waiting for some impossible denouement. Nevertheless, he was sick with apprehension. Would it merely be the prelude to another drama? Was his life to be a series of unwritten plays, of which he was both the hero and the bewildered spectator? Or would it bring him calm, the terrible calm of stagnation, of an inner life finished, sealed, buried? It was inevitable in these romantic surroundings and conditions that he should revert to his almost forgotten jealousy. Suppose Spaulding had stumbled upon something.... But he had been asked for no such evidence.... It would be a damnable liberty.... It might be inextricably woven with the business in hand.... There were other men besides Doremus whom Helene saw constantly.... Spaulding may have seen his chance to nip the thing in the bud, and had taken the risk.... He felt the detective's lips at his ear: "Hear anything? Move a little so's you can look up." Ruyler heard his wife's voice above him, then Aileen Lawton's. He parted the branches and saw the two girls lean over the low sill of the casement. Both had removed their masks, but their faces were only dimly revealed. Their voices, however, were distinct enough, and his wife's was dull and flat. "Oh, I can't," she said. "I can't." "Well, you'll just jolly well have to. You've got it, haven't you?" "Oh, yes, I've got it!" "Well, he'll never suspect you." "I shall tell him." "Tell him? You little fool. And give us all away?" "I'd mention no other names." "As if he wouldn't probe until he found out. Don't you know Price Ruyler yet? My father said once he'd have made a great District Attorney. What's the use of telling him later, for that matter? Why not now?" "I haven't the courage yet. I might have one day--at just the right moment. I never thought I was a coward." "You're just a kid. That's what's the matter. We ought to have left you out. I told Polly that--" "You couldn't! Oh, don't you see you couldn't. That's the terrible part of it! Left me out? I'd have found my way in." "I'm not so sure. You were interested in heaps of things, and in love, and all that--"