A spirit of restless loneliness took possession of him, as he stepped out into the crowded solitudes of Broadway. His thoughts ran back to the day that he had first met Frances Candler, when, half unwillingly joining forces with MacNutt, he had followed that most adroit of wire-tappers to his up-town house. He remembered his astonishment as the door swung back to MacNutt’s secret ring, and Frank stood there in the doorway, looking half timidly out at them, with her hand still on the knob. How far away it seemed; and yet, as the world went, it could be counted in months. He had thought her a mere girl at first, and he recalled how he imagined there had been a mistake in the house number, as he saw the well-groomed figure in black, with its wealth of waving chestnut hair, and the brooding violet eyes with their wordless look of childish weariness. It was only later that he had taken note of the ever betraying fulness of throat and breast, and the touch of mature womanhood in the shadows about the wistful eyes. He remembered, point by point, the slow English voice, with its full-voweled softness of tone, as she answered MacNutt’s quick questions, the warm mouth and its suggestion of impulsiveness, the girlishly winning smile with which she had welcomed him as her partner in that house of underground operating and unlooked-for adventure, the quick and nervous movements of the muscular body that always carried with it a sense of steely strength half-sheathed in softness. Bit by bit he recalled their tasks and their perils together. What touched him most, as he paced the odorous, lamp-hung valley of the Rialto, was the memory of this wistful woman’s sporadic yet passionate efforts to lead him back to honesty. Each effort, he knew, had been futile, though for her sake alone he had made not a few unthought of struggles to be decent and open and aboveboard in at least the smaller things of life. But the inebriation of great hazards was in his veins. They had taken great chances together; and thereafter, he felt, it could be only great chances that would move and stir and hold them. Now he would never be content, he knew, to lounge about the quiet little inns of life, with the memory of those vast adventures of the open in his heart and the thirst for those vast hazards in his veins. As he turned, in Longacre Square, to look back at that turbulent valley of lights below him, he remembered, incongruously enough, that the midnight Tenderloin was the most thoroughly policed of all portions of the city—the most guarded of all districts in the world. And what a name for it, he thought—the Tenderloin, the tenderest and most delectable, the juiciest and the most sustaining district in all New York, for the lawless egotist, whether his self-seeking took the form of pleasure or whether it took the form of profit!