It was long after midnight when the defiant lover returned to his apartment. The Magyar witch had finally learned the last secret of his honest heart, and with clinging arms had whispered through her kisses, "If you leave me, Randall, it is the death of our love." And, trusting blindly to his honest love, Clayton wagered his life upon a woman's faith. Under the door of his room lay a yellow envelope, and as the now resolute man read it he smiled grimly. "Victory!" he cried, for Ferris' words assured him of a coming triumph, a crown of life and love. It seemed that Irma's love had conquered after all. "Await me in New York. I think that we can arrange all for your remaining as you are." The signature was that of the artful Ferris. "And I think that Jack and I can handle you, my false friend!" sneered Clayton. While the young lover read the words which gave him a new hope, far across the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Fritz Braun, in his own private lair, was pondering over the words of Madame Raffoni, who had just left the man who was the iron tyrant of her soiled life. "I must give him a little more line! And I must either land the fish now or lose him forever." There was a steely gleam in the sleepless eyes of him who pondered upon his clouded pathway. "It must be done! And she must help in some way. She holds the winning cards now. Nothing else will draw him!" The masquerading criminal was almost desperate. It had been his by-play for years to play at hide and seek with humanity, using his duplex characters at first to throw off any pursuit of the Vienna police; and, later, to hide his nefarious operations on the New York side. Greedy for money, before Irma Gluyas had been driven to his arms by adverse fortunes, Fritz Braun had at first made his refuge at the "Valkyrie," then owned by Ludwig Sohmer, whose passion for "playing the races" had at last dragged him down. The Viennese fugitive diligently plied his erstwhile patron with drink and smilingly enmeshed the brutish peasant-bred Sohmer in a series of compounded loans. It was not long until all the employees recognized in the alert "August Meyer" the mainstay of the decaying fortunes of the half bankrupt Sohmer. Every evening, without fail, the sharp commands of Fritz Braun were now conveyed to the responsible underlings! Sohmer, staggering homeward with his greedy Aspasias from the Waterloo conflicts of the race-track, sullenly assented at last to the chattel mortgages and bills of sale which placed the "Valkyrie" and the whole building under August Meyer's name. Then, taking the downward road, Sohmer tried to drown himself in drink, and succeeded. When Sohmer was found dead in his bed, the millionaire brewer who backed the "Valkyrie," and the owner of the ground on which the building erected by Sohmer stood, gladly took on the active August Meyer in loco the departed Sohmer.