"'Mr. Mallowe,'" read Blaine, with a half-smile. "Show him in, Marsh, and have your men ready. You know what to do. No, Guy, you needn't go. This interview will not be a private one." "Mr. Blaine!" Mallowe entered pompously and then paused, glancing rather uncertainly from the detective to Morrow. It needed no keen observer to note the change in the man since the scene of that morning, at Miss Lawton's. He had become a mere shell of his former self. The smug unctuousness was gone; the jaunty side-whiskers drooped; his chalk-like skin fell in flabby folds, and his crafty eyes shifted like a hunted animal's. "Mr. Blaine, I had hoped for a strictly confidential conference with you, but I presume this person to be one of your trusted assistants, and it is immaterial now--the matter upon which I have come is too pressing! Scandal, notoriety must be averted at all costs! I find that a frightful, a hideous mistake has been made, and I am actually upon the point of being involved in a conspiracy as terrible as that of which my poor friend Pennington Lawton was the victim! And I am as innocent as he! I swear it!" "You may as well conserve your strength and your strategic ingenuity for the immediate future, Mr. Mallowe. You'll need both," Blaine returned, coolly. "If you've come here to make any appeal--" "I've come to assert my innocence!" the broken man cried with a flash of his old proud dignity. "I only learned this evening of the truth, and that those scoundrels Carlis and Rockamore had implicated me! How a man of your discernment and experience could believe for a moment that I was a party to any fraudulent--" Blaine pressed the bell. "There is no use in prolonging this interview, Mr. Mallowe!" he said, curtly. "All the evidence is in my hands." "But allow me to explain!" The flabby face grew more deathlike, until the burning eyes seemed peering from the face of a corpse. Two men entered, and at sight of them, the former pompous president of the Street Railways of Illington plumped to his fat, quaking knees. "For God's sake, listen! You must listen, Blaine!" he shrieked. "I am one of the prominent men of this country! I have three married daughters, two of them with small children! The disgrace, the infamy of this, will kill them! I will make restitution; I will--" "Pennington Lawton had one daughter, unmarried, unprovided for! Did you think of _her_?" asked Blaine, grimly. "I'm sorry for the innocent who must suffer with you, Mr. Mallowe, but in this instance the law must take its course. Lead him away." When the wailing, quavering voice had subsided behind the closing door, Henry Blaine turned to young Morrow with a weary look of pain, age-old, in his eyes.