"What are you going to do?" I asked, humiliated by the inadequacy of the question even as I uttered it. "I'm going to get away from it. I'm going to get away where I can breathe in peace. Oh, believe me, I can be irreproachable without even an effort. I want to be. I prefer it. I've found how much easier it makes life. It's not my past I've been afraid of. It's that one drug-soaked maniac, that poor helpless thing who knows that if I step away from him he daren't round a street-corner without being arrested." She stopped suddenly and the color ebbed out of her face. Then I saw her slowly rise to her feet and look undecidedly about the four corners of the room. Then she turned to me. Her eyes seemed ridiculously terrified. "_He's come!_" she said, in little more than a whisper. "He's here now!" The door opened before I could speak. But even before the mummy-faced man I had left at the café table the night before could stride into the room, the woman in front of me sank back into her chair. Over her face came a change, a veil, a quickly coerced and smiling-lipped blankness that reminded me of a pastoral stage-drop shutting out some grim and moving tragedy. The change in the bearing and attitude of the intruder was equally prompt as his startled eyes fell on me calmly seated within those four walls. He was not as quick as the woman in catching his cue. I could plainly detect the interrogative look he flashed at her, the look which demanded as plain as words: "What is this man doing here?" "This," said the woman at the table, in her most dulcet and equable tones, "is the altruistic gentleman who objects to your losing thirty thousand dollars in a race which I had no earthly way of controlling." Here, I saw, was histrionism without a flaw. Her fellow-actor, I could also see, was taking more time to adjust himself to his rôle. He was less finished in his assumption of accusatory indignation. But he did his best to rise to the occasion. "I've got to get that money back," he cried, leveling a shaking finger at her. "And I'm going to do it without dragging my friends into it!" She walked over to the windows and closed them before she spoke. "What's the use of going over all that?" she continued, and I had the impression of sitting before a row of foot-lights and watching an acted drama. "You took your risk and lost. I didn't get it. It's not my fault. You know as well as I do that McGowan and Noyes will never open up unless you're in a position to make them. It's a case of dog eat dog, of fighting fire with fire. And I've just been telling it all to your friend Mr. Kerfoot, who seems to think he's going to have some one arrested if we don't suddenly do the right thing." "I want my money!" cried the man named Whelan. I could see, even as he delivered his lines, that his mind was floundering and groping wildly about for solid ground.