“Oh!” she sniffed. She stared at him for a moment. There was something in which there was the uttermost of irony now, it seemed, in this meeting between them. Last night she had striven to meet him alone, and she had meant to devote to-night to the same purpose; and she was here with him now, and in a place than which, in her wildest hopes, she could have imagined one no better suited to the reckoning she would have demanded and forced. And she was helpless, powerless to make use of it. She was unarmed. Her revolver was gone. Without that to protect her, at an intimation that she was the White Moll she would never leave the shed alive. The spot would be quite as ideal under those circumstances for him, as it would have been under other circumstances for her. She shrugged her shoulders. Danglar's continued silence evidently invited further comment on her part. “Oh!” she sniffed again. “And I suppose, then, that you have been chasing the White Moll ever since last night at eleven, and that's why you didn't get around sooner to allay my fears, even though you knew I must be half mad with anxiety at the way things broke last night. She'll have us down and out for keeps if you haven't got brains enough to beat her. How much longer is this thing going on?” Danglar's little black eyes narrowed. She caught a sudden glint of triumph in them. It was Danglar now who laughed. “Not much longer!” His voice was arrogant with malicious satisfaction. “The luck had to turn, hadn't it? Well, it's turned! I've got the White Moll at last!” She felt the color leave her face. It seemed as though something had closed with an icy clutch upon her heart. She had heard aright, hadn't she?--that he had said he had got the White Moll at last. And there was no mistaking the mans s sinister delight in making that announcement. Had she been premature, terribly premature, in assuring herself that her identity was still safe as far as he was concerned? Did it mean that, after all, he had been playing at cat-and-mouse with her, as she had at first feared? “You--you've got the White Moll?” She forced the words from her lips, striving to keep her voice steady and in control, and to infuse into it an ironical incredulity. “Sure!” he said complacently. “The showdown comes to-night. In another hour or so we'll have her where we want her, and--” “Oh!” She laughed almost hysterically in relief. “I thought so! You haven't got her yet. You're only going to get her--in another hour or so! You make me tired! It's always in 'another hour or so' with you--and it never comes off!” Danglar scowled at her under the taunt. “It'll come off this time!” he snarled in savage menace. “You hold that tongue of yours! Yes, it'll come off! And when it does”--a sweep of fury sent the red into his working face--“I'll keep the promise I made her once--that she'd wish she had never been born! D'ye hear, Bertha?”