During his narrow and busy life Durkin had known few women; never before had he known a woman like this one, with whom destiny had so strangely ordained that he should talk and drive and idle, work and watch and plot. He looked once more at her thick, tumbled chestnut hair, at the soft pallor of her oval cheek, and the well-gowned figure, as she stooped over a condenser,—wondering within himself how it would all end, and what was the meaning of it. “Well, this certainly does beat me!” he said, at last, slowly, yet contentedly enough. The young woman looked at him; and he caught a second glimpse of her wistfully pensive smile, while his heart began to thump, in spite of himself. He reached out a hesitating hand, as though to touch her. “What is it?” she asked, in her mellow English contralto. “I don’t exactly know,” he answered, with his hand before his eyes. “I wish you’d tell me.” She came and sat down in a chair before him, pushing back her tumbled hair with one hand, seeming to be measuring him with her intent gaze. She appeared in some way not altogether dissatisfied with him; it seemed almost as if she had taken his face between her two hands, and read it, feature by feature. “I hardly know where to begin,” she hesitated. “I mean, I don’t know how much they’ve explained to you already. Indeed, there’s a great deal I don’t understand myself. But, of course, you know that we have tapped Penfield’s private wire.” He nodded an assenting head toward the little brass sounder. “And, of course, you are able to judge why. He gets all the race returns at the club house, and then sends them on by private ’phone to his other two pool-rooms. He has to do it that way, now that New York is not so open, and ever since the Postal-Union directors pretended to cut out their sporting service.” Durkin knew all this, but he waited for the sake of hearing her voice and watching the play of her features. “Every track report, you know, comes into New York by way of the race department of the Postal-Union on lower Broadway. There, messenger boys hurry about with the reports to the different wire-operators, who wire the returns to the company’s different subscribers. Penfield, of course, is really one of them, though it’s not generally known.” “And always most astutely denied,” scoffed Durkin. “Many things are astutely denied, nowadays, when a great deal of money comes out of them,” she said, wearily. “But what have you and I to do with all this?” he broke in. “Quite enough! You see, there’s a delay of fifteen minutes, naturally, in getting a result to the pool-rooms. That gives us our chance; so, we hold up the message here, ’phone it at once over to MacNutt’s rooms, three doors from Penfield’s, and, when he has had time to drop in, as it were, and place his money, we send through our intercepted message.” “Then Penfield has no idea who or what MacNutt is?”