While Mr. Gilmore was an exceedingly capable accomplice, at once resourceful, energetic, unsentimental and conscienceless, he yet combined with these solid merits, certain characteristics which rendered uninterrupted intercourse with him a horror and a shame to Marshall Langham who was daily and almost hourly paying the price the gambler had set on his silence. And what a price it was! Gilmore was his master, coarse, brutal, and fiercely exacting. How he hated him, and yet how necessary he had become; for the gambler never faltered, was never uncertain; he met each difficulty with a callous readiness which Langham knew he himself would utterly have lacked. He decided this was because Gilmore was without imagination, since in his own many fearful, doubting moments, he saw always what he had come to believe as the inevitable time when the wicked fabric they were building would collapse like a house of cards in a gale of wind, and his terrible secret would be revealed to all men. All this while, step by step, Gilmore, without haste but without pause, was moving toward his desires. He came and went in the Langham house as if he were master there. When Marshall had first informed Evelyn that he expected to have Mr. Gilmore in to dinner, there had been a scene, and she had threatened to appeal to the judge; but he told her fiercely that he would bring home whom he pleased, that it suited him to be decent to Andy and that was all there was to it. And apparently she soon found something to like in this strange intimate of her husband's; at least she had made no protest after the gambler's first visit to the house. On his part Gilmore was quickly conscious of the subtle encouragement she extended him. She understood him, she saw into his soul, she divined his passion for her and she was not shocked by it. In his unholy musings he told himself that here was a woman who was dead game--and a lady, too, with all the pretty ways and refinements that were so lacking in the other women he had known. Montgomery was some two days gone toward the West and Gilmore had dropped around ostensibly to see Marshall Langham, but in reality to make love to Marshall Langham's wife, when the judge, looking gray and old, walked in on the little group unobserved. He paused for an instant near the door. Evelyn was seated before the piano and Gilmore was bending above her, while Marshall, with an unread book in his hands and with a half-smoked cigar between his teeth, was lounging in front of the fire. The judge's glance rested questioningly on Gilmore, but only for a moment. Then an angry flame of recognition colored his thin cheeks. Aware now of his father's presence, Marshall tossed aside his book and quitted his chair. For two days he had been dreading this meeting, and for two days he had done what he could to avert it. "You must have had a rather cold walk, father; let me draw a chair up close to the fire for you," he said.