It was a run of eight miles in the moonlight, and in a few minutes they were at the Venetian Gate with the Dogana guards asking Tarsis if he had any dutiable goods. Their pace was not diminished much when they were under way again on the pavement of the Corso. There was a man in Rome whom Tarsis wanted to catch on the wire before he should leave his home for the opera, and time was valuable. Pedestrians cursed Sandro as he flew by with tooting horn. At Via Monte Napoleone, where they left the Corso, Tarsis smiled as he thought of the mythical directors’ meeting he told Hera he had to attend. Another minute and he was entering the door of his private offices in Piazza Pellico. All the clerks had gone to their homes, and no one but the old porter saw him enter the building. With a key he let himself into that part of the suite where his exclusive apartment was, and went at once to his desk and took up the receiver of a telephone. “Put me in communication with 16 A, Quirinale, Rome,” he said. In the wait that followed he drew from his pocket the writing of Hera, spread out the crumpled paper, and to make sure that his plan should fit in with the words she had written, he read again the message intended for Mario Forza: “He would hold me to engagement. I have told him it cannot be. He maintains that if guided by justice I must keep my word, and asks me to appeal to you. He is willing to abide by your decision. Answer at once. “H.” He smiled to think how well Hera had played into his hands in the wording of the message--how easy she had made it for him to give practical form to his project of withholding it from Mario and arranging with a confederate in Rome to send an answer supposably from Mario that should counsel Hera to stand by her engagement of marriage. About the day of reckoning, when his treachery should be disclosed, Tarsis was not the sort of man to worry. Time enough, he told himself to meet that difficulty when it appeared. In this moment, his crowning ambition at stake, every consideration of life dwindled to nothingness before that of making certain of performance the ceremony appointed for the following day. The telephone bell jingled.