“He knows him only as a real estate agent with a passion for plunging, a great deal of money, and—and—” The girl shrugged a rounded shoulder, flushed a little, and did not finish. “And you know him as—?” suggested Durkin. “That lies outside the area of essential information,” she answered, with her first show of animation. “But you?” Durkin persisted. She met his eyes, but she refused to deal with his cross-questioning. He was still waiting for that betraying sign which was to conjure away the enigma. Yet he rejoiced, inwardly, at the thought that it had not come. “Both you and I shall have to drop in, on certain days, and do what we can at Penfield’s lower house, while Mackenzie is doing the Madison Avenue place. We’ve been going there, on and off, for weeks now, getting ready for—for this!” “Then MacNutt’s been working on this scheme for a long while?” “Yes, this house has been rented by the month, furnished, just as you see it, simply because it stood in about the right place. We have even lost a few hundred dollars, altogether, in Penfield’s different places. But, in the end, the three of us are to hit Penfield together, on a ragged field, when there’s a chance for heavy odds. But, of course, we can do it only once!” “And then what?” asked Durkin. Again the girl shrugged a shoulder. “Penfield’s patrons are all wealthy men,” she went on, in a sort of pedagogic explicitness. “The betting, particularly at the upper house, is always very heavy. A book of a hundred thousand dollars is common enough; sometimes it goes up to two or three hundred thousand. So, you see, it all depends on our odds. MacNutt himself hopes to make at least a hundred thousand. But then he has worked and brooded over it all so long, I don’t think he sees things quite clearly now!” It was her first shadow of reflection on their chief, and Durkin caught up the cue. “He seems sharp enough still, to leave you and me here, to take all the risk in a raid,” he protested. “Yes,” she assented, with the touch of weariness that came into her voice at times. “He is shrewd and sharp—shrewder and sharper than you would dare believe.” “And of course you understand your risk, now, here, from this moment on?” “Yes, I quite understand it,” she answered, with unbetraying evenness of voice. His fingers were toying nervously with a little magnetic “wire finder.” “How in heavens did _you_ ever get mixed up with—with—in this sort of thing?” Durkin at last demanded, exasperated into the immediate question. He turned on her quickly, as he asked it, and the eyes of the two met, combatively, for a moment or two. It was the girl who at last looked away. “How did _you_?” she asked, quietly enough. She was strangely unlike any woman bookie he had seen or heard of before. “Oh, me,—I’m different!” he cried, deprecatively. For some subtle reason she went pale, and then flushed hot again. “You’re—you’re not MacNutt’s wife?” he asked her, almost hopelessly.