The approaching car swept past; another followed; and neither paused their swift progress. There was no reason why they should have noticed anything. Don Haskins lifted out the limp form and carried it well back to the side of the road, where he quickly rifled the senseless man's pockets, taking nineteen dollars and thirty-five cents in cash, a good watch, and the driving license. Then he donned the chauffeur's cap and climbed into the taxi; an instant later he was speeding on northward--alone. He was headed for the one place where he was sure that he would find money and protection--Greenacres. CHAPTER VIII CAUGHT IN THE WEB The wife of Kirklan Gilmore was not literary, had not even any tendencies in that direction; no literary qualifications had been required for her employment as a typist in Atchinson's publishing house. Her reading had been superficial, shallow, but she had an adaptable mind and was constantly picking up surface things, chance clever little quips and quotations, which, if she were not put to a severe test, might pass for an acquaintance with the classics. When, overwhelmed by the appearance of Victor Sarbella as her husband's guest, she had fled to her room, it was with the realization that still another specter of the past had appeared to haunt and undo her. And there flashed through her mind a fragment of an old quotation: Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive. Yes, what a tangled web she had woven--inextricably enmeshed in the snarled skeins of her ambitious folly. How circumstances had conspired against her. "What a fool I was to think I could get by with it!" she whispered bitterly. "How will it end? It was bad enough without Sarbella. Him--him! It was like a ghost from the grave. He will tell my husband; of course he will tell him--he could want no better revenge than that. That look in his eyes--how he hates me!" She began to think of flight, even made a half-hearted, indecisive move to gather up some of her things, but there was no train now until morning, and the thought of driving the car, novice at the wheel that she was, through the dark night terrified her. Besides which the car was probably in the garage, locked; and she did not have the key. There seemed nothing to do but wait. Helen would have been a very blind person indeed had she not realized that Kirklan had sensed something amiss in the amazing meeting between her and Sarbella; and, as time dragged on--eight o'clock, nine, and then ten--she wondered why her husband had not come raging upstairs to fling the past accusingly into her face, to order her out of the house, perhaps to kill her! "Surely he would come if he knew," she told herself. "Hasn't Sarbella told him? Why, he--he must have told him!" It was past her understanding.