“It’s a lie, Jim, it’s a lie!” she exulted insanely, turning and springing to the transmitter, and catching up the still swaying receiver. “Do you hear me, Jim? It’s a lie—I’m here, waiting for you! _Jim, can’t you hear?_” But Durkin had fainted away at the other end of the wire, and no response came to her cries. She flung herself down upon the collapsed MacNutt, and tore open his coat and vest. As she did so the polished pig-skin wallet fell out on the floor. His heart was still beating, but it would be murder, she felt, to leave him there without attention. His life was his own. She wanted and would take only what the written law would allow. She wanted only her own. She came to a sudden pause, as she looked from the paper wealth between her fingers to the huge and huddled figure beside her. Some inner and sentinel voice, from the calmer depths of her nature, was demanding of her how much of what had thus come into her hand _was_ her own? After all, how much of that terrible and tainted wealth could truly be called their own?—was the untimely question this better part of her was crying out. She knew that in the end most usurious toll would be exacted for what she took. Her life had taught her that no lasting foundation of good, no enduring walls of aspiration, could be built on the engulfing sloughs of evil. And as she looked at her prostrate enemy once more, and breathed out a fervent and grateful: “Oh, God, I thank Thee for this deliverance!” a sudden chastening and abnegative passion prompted her to thrust back every dollar she had drawn from that capacious wallet. Then she thought of the future, of the exigent needs of life, of the necessities of her immediate flight; and her heart sank within her. To begin life again with a clean slate—that had been her constant wish. Yet much as she hungered to do so, she dare not leave it all. As with many another aspiring soul in quieter walks of life, she found herself grimly but sorrowfully compelled to leave the pure idea sacrificed on the altar of compromise. All life, she told herself, was made up of concessions. She could only choose the lesser evil, and through it still strive to grope a little onward and upward.