"I don't know yet," he answered. "I haven't thought much about it--but we'll manage somehow." She shook her head. "I've thought a great deal about it since yesterday--and I'm not so sure it is to be 'managed somehow'--and the more I've thought the more tangled and complicated it has become." "Well, we'll untangle it to-morrow," said Madison, with a smile, "and--" "No"--she touched his sleeve. "To-night. Let us do it now--to-night. I should be so happy then." He smiled at her again, and drew her to him. "But we ought to have Pale Face and the Flopper too, don't you think so?" he said. "Of course," she said; "and so we will. The Flopper is here, and we can send him for Harry. It's early yet--not ten o'clock." "All right," said Madison; "if you wish it. We'll go in then and get the Flopper." And so they walked to the cottage door, and into the porch--but in the porch Madison held her for a moment, and lifted up her face again and looked into her eyes. "My--wife," he whispered--and took her in his arms. --XXIII-- THE WAY OUT Strange scene indeed! Strange antithesis to that other night when these four were gathered in that crime-reeked, sordid room at the Roost--where Pale Face Harry, gaunt, emaciated, coughed, and, trembling, plunged a morphine needle in his arm; where the Flopper, a wretched tatterdemalion from the gutter, licked greedy lips and gloated in his rascality; where Helena, flushed-faced, inhaled her interminable cigarettes and dangled her legs from the table edge; where Madison, suave, flippant, so certain of his own infallibility, glorying in his crooked masterpiece, laid the tribute to genius at his own feet! Strange scene! Strange antithesis indeed! It was quiet here--very still--only the distant, muffled boom of the pounding surf. And the shrine-room, for the first time since its creation, was locked against the night. It lay now in shadow from the single lamp upon the table--and the light, where it fell in a shortened circle, for the lamp itself had a little green paper shade, was soft, subdued and mellow. Where he had been wont to sit in the days gone by, the Patriarch sat now in his armchair by the empty fireplace--in the shadow--his head turned in his strange, listening, attentive way toward the table--toward the four who were grouped around it. There had been no one to stay with him in his own room, and so Helena had brought him there--to play his silent part.