"Do you know it?" she quietly asked as she passed it over to me. It took but a glance to show me that it was a picture of the man whose cause I was at that moment espousing, the man I had followed from the North River pier-end the night before. A second glance showed me that the photograph had been taken in London; it bore the stamped inscription: "Garet Childs, Regent's Park, N. W." The woman's sustained attitude of anticipation, of expectation unfulfilled, puzzled me. I saw nothing remarkable about the picture or her possession of it. "This, I believe, is the man you're trying to save from the clutches of a wire-tapper named Whelan, Coke Whelan, as you call him?" I acknowledged that it was. "Now look at the signature written across it," she prompted. I did as she suggested. Inscribed there I read: "Sincerely and more, Duncan Cory Whelan." "Have I now made the situation comparatively clear to you?" she asked, watching my face as I looked from her to the photograph and then back to her again. "I must confess, I don't quite grasp it," I admitted, thinking at the moment how her face in the strong side-light from the windows had taken on a quite accidental touch of pathos. "It's simply that the man you are trying to save from Coke Whelan is _Coke Whelan himself_." "That's impossible!" was my exclamation. "It's not impossible," she said a little wearily, "because the whole thing's nothing more than a plant, a frame-up. And you may as well know it. It can't go on. The whole thing _was a plan to trap you_." "A plan to trap me?" "Yes, a carefully worked-out plan to gather you in. And now, you see, the machinery is slipping a cog where it wasn't expected to!" I stood there incredulous, dazed, trying to digest the shock. "You mean that the man I met and talked to last night is actually an accomplice of yours?" "Yes," she answered, "if you care to put it that way." "But I can't believe it. I _won't_ believe it until you bring him here and prove it." She sank into her chair, with a half-listless motion for me to be seated. "Do you know why he's called Coke Whelan?" she demanded. I did not. "That, too, you've got to know. It's because he's a heroin and cocaine fiend. He's killing himself with the use of drugs. He's making everything impossible. It's left him irresponsible, as dangerous as any lunatic would be at large." She turned and looked at a tiny jeweled watch. "He will be here himself by ten o'clock. And if he heard me saving what I am at this moment, he would kill me as calmly as he'd sit at a café table and lie to you." "But what's the good of those lies?"