"Don't be a death's head, Quib!" he retorted. "Why, even if he turned State's evidence, no one would believe him! Have another glass of this vintage--we can drink it every night now for a year at Dillingham's expense!" "Well, here's to you, Gottlieb!" I answered, filling my goblet with creaming wine; "and here's to crime--whereby we live and move and have our being!" And we clinked our glasses and drained them with a laugh. I had now been a resident of New York for upward of twenty years and had acquired, as the junior member of the firm of Gottlieb & Quibble, an international reputation. It is true that my partner and I felt it to be beneath our dignity to advertise in the newspapers --and, indeed, advertising in New York City was for us entirely unnecessary--but we carried a card regularly in the English journals and received many retainers from across the water; in fact, we controlled practically all the theatrical business in the city, drawing the contracts for the managers and being constantly engaged in litigations on their behalf. We had long since abandoned as trivial all my various profit-sharing schemes, and, with the exception of carrying on our pay-rolls many of the attendants attached to the police and other criminal courts, had practically no "runners." We did not need any. There was no big criminal case in which we were not retained for the defence and rarely a divorce action of any notoriety where we did not appear for one of the parties. This matter of Hawkins's was the first in twenty years in which he had ever deliberately faked an entire case! Yet, if ever there was a safe opportunity to do so, this seemed the one, and I cannot even now charge Gottlieb with recklessness in taking the chances that he did; but, as luck would have it, there were two facts connected with the Dillingham annulment the significance of which we totally overlooked--one, that Bunce was not so much of a fool as he looked, and the other, that Mrs. Dillingham was a mother. Once, however, judgment had been entered to the effect that Mrs. Dillingham had never lawfully ceased to be Mrs. Hawkins, then the real reason of our client's anxiety to be rid of his wife and her child, a girl of six years, became apparent; for he instantly announced his engagement to a fashionable widow, who lacked money if not experience, and who needed the one as much as he had a super- abundance of the other. He made a fairly liberal allowance for his child and its mother, and since this was paid monthly through our office, I had an opportunity of making their acquaintance; and I confess that I had no sooner done so than I began to have a sort of regret for my own part in the transaction. For Mrs. Dillingham --Hawkins, or whatever she was--proved to be a rather sweet-faced young woman, with great, sad blue eyes and a winsomely childish innocence of expression that concealed, as I afterward found out, a will of iron and a heart full of courage.