"I guess we can fix it all right," came Fred’s voice in the telephone. "But you’d better come over with the check. There’s about six hundred dollars in the club till. I have a couple of hundred with me. And we can raise the rest." Pendleton heard him. "Go ahead," he said. "I’ll fix up about a berth with the head porter in the meanwhile." "What’s the big idea?" was Fred’s greeting, as I entered the club. "Private," I told him laconically. "Sending a man to the antipodes because he’s unfit to live in this climate." "Oh—sick man?" Fred was sympathetic. "Very sick," I told him. "Incurable," Fifteen minutes later I was in the hotel, handing Pendleton the money. "Now what d’you want me to sign?" he queried carelessly. "Not a thing," I answered. For on a sudden the futility of holding Pendleton to any bond overwhelmed me. Any respite, even a few weeks from his presence, seemed a paradise. Paradise seemed cheap at a thousand dollars. And who can safeguard paradise? Besides, if I knew my man at all, it would be some time before he would return to an environment he so thoroughly loathed. I was no more safe with his signature than without—and no less. "That’s about all, then," he said, and he had the decency not to hold out his hand. "Good luck," he added in an undertone. I made no answer and turned my face away from him with a wonderful sense of relief. No sooner had the porter bustled out with his things and the door closed than I looked toward my own small bag with the dominant thought of returning home. But I could not move. I found myself shaking like a leaf and I sank down in the nearest chair, quivering as though the vibration in my nerves would hurl my body to pieces. No, I could not go home in this state. And taking off my coat with hands that shook as in a palsy, I threw myself upon the bed. But before I passed into the sleep of stupefied exhaustion a single insistent foreboding kept dully throbbing through my brain. "He will come back—Pendleton will come back!" *CHAPTER XIX* Exultation filled me when I awoke late in the morning. Though I had slept in my clothes and felt particularly disheveled, I stripped with the joy of an athlete after a victory and plunged into the cool invigorating bath. Pendleton was gone! I do not remember the emotions of Sinbad when he had rid himself of the Old Man of the Sea. But his emotions must have resembled mine. My heart sang, I sang myself. I was manumitted. I was free. To my intimate journal may I not say that I felt myself a man? I had fought the beast at Ephesus, my pulses blasphemously and jubilantly informed me, and by the Lord, I had won!