Though the wire was in a measure public, Raymer risked a single word. "Charlotte." None of the sudden passion that leaped into Margery Grierson's eyes was suffered to find its way into her voice when she said: "What makes you think that?" "Oh, a lot of little things. I was over at the house last night, and there is some sort of a tea-pot tempest going on; I couldn't make out just what. But from the way things shaped up, I gathered that our friend was wanted in Lake Boulevard, and wanted bad--for some reason or other. I had to promise that I'd try to dig him up, before I got away." "Well?" went the questioning word over the wires, and this time the impatient accent was unconcealed. "I promised; but this morning Doctor Bertie called me up to say that it was all right; that I needn't trouble myself." "And I needn't have troubled you," said the voice at the Mereside transmitter. "Excuse _me_, as Hank Billingsly used to say when he happened to shoot the wrong man. Come over when you feel like it--and have time. You mustn't forget that you owe me two calls. Good-by." After Margery Grierson had let herself out of the stifling little closet under the hall stair, she went into the darkened library and sat for a long time staring at the cold hearth. It was a crooked world, and just now it was a sharply cruel one. There was much to be read between the lines of the short telephone talk with Edward Raymer. The trap was sprung and its jaws were closing; and in his extremity Kenneth Griswold was turning, not to the woman who had condoned and shielded and paid the costly price, but to the other. "Dear God!" she said softly, when the prolonged stare had brought the quick-springing tears to her eyes; "and I--_I_ could have kept him safe!" XXXVIII THE PENDULUM-SWING To a man seeking only to escape from himself, all roads are equal and all destinations likely to prove uniformly disappointing. Turning his back upon the Iron Works in the day of defeat, with no very clear idea of what he should do or where he should go, Griswold pushed through the strikers' picket lines, and, avoiding the militant suburb, drifted by way of sundry outlying residence streets and a country road to the high ground back of the city. In deserting Raymer he was actuated by no motive of disloyalty. On the contrary, so much of the motive as had any bearing upon his relations with the young iron-founder sprang from a generous impulse to free Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil spell, and Raymer could well spare him.