"Because, you little white fluffy toy donkey, the last thing in the world Mrs. Kildair wants is to have him do anything at all, and, as you are putty in the hands of any pretty woman, he doesn’t intend to have you call him off." "I’ll see Mrs. Kildair at Louise’s. What am I to say?" Gunther shrugged his shoulders. "Wonder if she’s really playing to be Mrs. Slade," he said grimly. "If she is, she’ll give that up after tonight." "What’s going to happen to him, Bruce?" "He’ll come out with so little left that a Committee on Virtue will arrest him for indecent exposure—and the country will be saved." Beecher stopped before the telephone. "Wonder if Mrs. Kildair really was on the ’phone?" he said meditatively. The thought recalled Miss Charters, but without disturbing his equanimity. "Bruce," he said joyfully, rushing to dress, "Tilton’s crazy to have me go to Africa with him. By Jove, I’ve half made up my mind! Give me a man’s life; a life with men, out in the open—dogs and horses, and nothing but a few lions and fat elephants to bother you!" When they arrived at Mrs. Fontaine’s, they found, to their surprise, that Mrs. Kildair had been delayed by an automobile breaking down, and would only join them later at the opera. Not one of them had the faintest suspicion, when later Mrs. Kildair calmly entered the box, that she had passed through two hours of supreme agitation that had left her torn between hope and dread—her whole future staked on one turn. Slade, face to face with the crisis that would determine whether he would survive as one of the figures of the financial world, or return staggering into the oblivion of the commonplace, had gone to see her in the afternoon. Confronted, too, by the imminent outcome of a gamble that had absorbed all her ambitions and her hopes, she had recklessly thrown aside all the restraints which she had interposed between them; and by an impulse of daring which makes such women irresistible to men, having invented an excuse for Mrs. Fontaine, had kept him to dinner, trusting to his protection, insisting on his confidence. Afterward she had driven him to the gray, prison-like structure which Gunther called a home, and seen him, defiant with a defiance she had breathed into him, with the scorn of the gambler who comes at length to the ultimate stake walk up the steps past the group of newspaper men, who, suddenly ceasing their chatter, huddled together and watched him with a unanimous craning of their heads. *CHAPTER XVII*