"He must have followed me in from the street when the door was unlocked. Or he may have come in before I did, and kept in hiding somewhere." "Who left the door unlocked?" "Simmonds." "Why?" "Because he could trust me!" There was a muffled barb in this retort, a barb which I could not understand. I could see, however, that it had its effect on the other man. He stared at the woman with sudden altered mien, with a foolish drop of the jaw which elongated his face and widened his eyes at the same moment. Then he wheeled on the sullen Hobbs. "_Hobbs, you lied about her!_" he cried, like a blind man at last facing the light. He had his hand on the bound and helpless burglar's throat. "Tell me the truth, or by the living God, I'll kill you! You lied about her?" "About what?" temporized Hobbs. "You know what!" Hobbs, I noticed, was doing his best to shrink back from the throttling fingers. "It wasn't my fault!" he equivocated. "But you lied?" Hobbs did not answer, in words. But the man in the dressing-gown knew the answer, apparently, before he let the inert figure fall away from his grasp. He turned, in a daze, back to the waiting and watching woman, the white-faced woman with her soul in her eyes. His face seemed humbled, suddenly aged with some graying blight of futile contrition. The two staring figures appeared to sway and waver toward each other. Before I could understand quite what it all meant the man had raised his arms and the woman had crept into them. "Oh, Jim, I've been such a fool!" I heard her wail. And I could see that she was going to cry. I knew, too, that that midnight of blunders had left me nothing to be proud of, that I had been an idiot from the first--and to make that idiocy worse, I was now an intruder. "I'll slip down and look after that phoning," I mumbled, so abashed and humiliated that as I groped wearily out through the door I stumbled over the Russian-squirrel bundle which I had placed there with my own hands. It was not until I reached the street that I realized, with a gulp of relief, how yet another night of threatening misery had been dissembled and lost in action, very much as the pills of childhood are dissembled in a spoonful of jelly. CHAPTER V THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT I sat in that nocturnal sun-parlor of mine, known to the world as Madison Square, demanding of the quiet night why sleep should be denied me, and doing my best to keep from thinking of Mary Lockwood. I sat there with my gaze fixed idly on a girl in black, who, in turn, stared idly up at _Sagittarius_. Then I lost interest in the black-clad and seemingly cataleptic star-gazer. For I was soon busy watching a man in a rather odd-looking velour hat. My eyes followed him from the moment he first turned eastward out of Fifth Avenue. They were still on him as he veered irresolutely southward again into the square where I sat.