Durkin had forgotten both his hunger and his weariness as he mounted the stairs to his up-town apartment, where, he knew, Frances was waiting for him. He decided, in his playful reaction of mood, to take her by surprise. So he slipped his pass-key silently into the door-lock and was about to fling the door wide when the unexpected sound of voices held him motionless, with his hand still on the knob. It was Frank herself speaking. “Oh, Mack, don’t come between him and me now! It’s all I’ve got to live for—his love! I need it—I need him!” “The devil you do!” said a muttered growl. “Oh, I do! I always wanted the love of an honest man.” “An honest man!” again scoffed the deep bass of the other’s voice, with a short little laugh. It was MacNutt who spoke. “An honest man! Then what were you hanging round Sunset Bryan for?” “Yes, an honest man,” went on the woman’s voice impetuously; “he is honest in his love for me, and that is all I care! Leave him to me, and I’ll give you everything. If it’s money you want, I’ll get you anything—anything in reason! I can still cheat and lie and steal for you, if you like—it was you who _taught_ me how to do that!” Durkin felt that he could stand no more of it; but still he listened, spellbound, incapable of action or thought. “I’ve got to have money!” agreed MacNutt quietly. “That’s true enough!” Then he added insolently, “But I almost feel I’d rather have you!” “No, no!” moaned the woman, seemingly in mingled horror and fear of him. “Only wait and I’ll get you what money I have here—every cent of it! It’s in my pocketbook, here, in the front room!” Durkin could hear her short, hard breath, and the swish of her skirt as she fluttered across the bare floor into the other room. He could hear the other’s easy, half-deprecating, half-mocking laugh; and at the sound of it all the long-banked, smoldering, self-consuming fires of jealous rage that burned within him seemed to leap and burst into relieving flame. An invisible cord seemed to snap before his eyes—it might have been within his very brain, for all he knew. “And now I kill him!” This one idea spun through his mind, the one living wheel in all the deadened machinery of consciousness. Darting back until he felt the plaster of the narrow hallway behind him, he flung himself madly forward against the door again. He kicked with the solid flat of his boot-sole as he came, against the light pine, painted and grained to look like oak. It crashed in like so much kindling, and a second later, white to the very lips, he was in the room, facing MacNutt. In his hand he held his revolver. It was of blue metal, with the barrel sawed off short. It had once been carried by a Chinaman, and had figured in a Mock Duck Street feud, and had been many times in pawnshops, and had passed through many hands.