“It would be a heavenly angel flung to a wolf no matter how you dressed the situation up; an’ I said to myself, ‘You can’t beat him. The devil’s got a set of traps for any kind of a layout!’” He lifted himself on his great hands and turned the whole of his body toward me. “Now,” he said, “what’s the difference how you ruin a woman? When you got the job finished, ain’t it finished? If you string it out over a dozen years and kill everything nice and generous and lovely in her with your little, contemptible ‘all for _me_’ meanness, inside of a preacher’s permit, ain’t you ruined her, just the same as if you’d white-slaved her? And ain’t it the same motive, ‘all for _me_,’ darn the difference? “I tell you,” he shook the arms of the chair in his great hands, “the thing begun to get my goat. Her father, a lawyer in the South, was dead. She had only the old Boston grandmother (I heard the talk among the women) and the coin was getting scarce. Your little Englishman played in form, every point correct, and he was goin’ to get her. “I seen it! “She was standing before the hotel desk with the bill that the clerk puts in your box at the end of the week, when his big motor snorted in against the wooden steps. Your little Westridge understood it for the grin started. It was the same old grin that goes with the job—I’ve seen it on all of ’em. “An’ that settled it!” His voice became cold, level, even like a metallic click. “‘Now, my little gentleman,’ I said to myself, ‘we’ll just see if you do! Right here is where “Alibi Al” sets in with a stack of blues.’ “I got up, folded my newspaper, and took a turn up and down the veranda, as though I was trying out my game leg, an’ then I limped down to the fashionable church just across from the library. “I stepped up inside the door.” He paused, and his voice changed to its former note. “You see I had to have a little help on this job. It had a big loose end. “I went in and sat down in a pew. It was dim and quiet and I got right down to business. I didn’t run in any of the prayer-book curtain-raisers. I put the thing right up to the boss. “‘Now, look here, Governor,’ I said, ‘has a helpless little girl got a pull with you, or is it bunk? Because I’m a-goin’ to call you, and if the line your barkers are putting out is on the level, you’ve got to come across with the goods. If there’s nothing to it, the Government ought to shut ’em up on a fraud order—I’m a-goin’ to carry one end of this thing; get busy at the other end!’ “Then I went out. “That night I went over to see little Westridge. “They’d been to dinner at Jordan’s Pond and had come in early. Westridge wasn’t in the hotel; he was stopping with the Lesterfields; a big, gray stone house facing the sea. The butler showed me in. There wasn’t anybody about but Westridge. The Lesterfields were down at Newport.