The Lone Wolf Returns

DETECTIVE CRANE OBEYING THE INSTINCT OF PROFESSION, AT THE SAME TIME ADMIRES THE FASCINATING CROOK, MICHAEL LANYARD.

"Not the last time by a long sight," Morphew bluntly contradicted; "but I know when you mean."

"Today one begins to wonder if that boast was good only because the Lone Wolf had never been given proper provocation."

Morphew took time to digest this. "You talk as crooked as you work," he concluded; "but the way I take it, that's a threat."

"It is altogether as you care to take it."

"If you don't like the way you've been handled, you've only got yourself to blame. I've given you every chance to come through like a gentleman—"

"But constituted yourself judge of whether I did or not."

The wooden set of Morphew's features became, if possible, more than ever marked, the puffed lids curtained more jealously those repellant eyes, his ruminative way with the cigar knew a momentary break.

With a vaguely innocent smile Lanyard snuggled down into luxurious upholstery and utilized the wait to look the room over with intelligent interest in the taste which had ruled its composition. A surprisingly handsome library, decorated and furnished with a dignity in no degree oppressive: all at wide odds with an environment such as one might have expected that bejewelled block of flesh to create for itself.

But the ominous pause was beginning to irk Pagan's nerves. He moved restlessly from his station at Morphew's back and laid hands upon a decanter which, with glasses and a siphon bottle, occupied a tray on one end of the library table.

"How about a little snifter, what?" he suggested with a leer overshoulder.

"Thank you," Lanyard returned politely—"but one recalls too well your black art as a bar-tender, monsieur; one hesitates to risk another waking up to find oneself accused of—it might well be—murder."

As if involuntarily, but without moving a superficial muscle, Morphew permitted a meditative rumble to escape him: "Murder . . ." And in a startled movement not wholly affected Lanyard sat up.

"Pardon, monsieur! one ought to keep a better guard upon one's tongue lest one put ideas into your head."

"Oh I say now! cut it out, can't you?" Pagan hastily remonstrated. "Why not be a sport, call that little skirmish of ours the fortunes of war, and let it go at that? No end of water has flowed down the Hudson since that night when you cut up so nasty—about nothing at all, practically—Morph here had to give you a taste of the whip. Not that he wanted to, but you asked for it, Lanyard—and you know you did!"

"But truly, monsieur, this grows fatiguing . . ."

"Everything's so different tonight," Pagan brightly argued. "We've all been through so much, we know one another heaps better—there isn't any sense at all in our keeping on at loggerheads."

"There is not?"

"Why! if the last half year has proved anything it's that we're all travelling one road, aiming at the same mark . . . Or shall we say marks, so long as the dear American people ain't listening in? . . . And now we've all made our mistakes and are ready to admit and profit by them—you're going to cut out all this running round in circles and frothing at the mouth, going to come in and lie down under the table and be a good dog."

"I am?"

"Sure thing. Ask Morph: he knows. And you will, too, before long, if you don't now. And then we'll all be just like this"—Pagan illustrated by lacing his fingers—"just girls together, you know, all out for a good time. So why not begin the peace conference with just one friendly little hooter? It'll do us both good: you've had a hard day of it, and you've given us a hard night."

"It desolates me, monsieur, to think I have been, however unwittingly, the agent of your martyrdom to insomnia."

"Well: what did you think?" Giving up the ungrateful work of trying to seduce Lanyard into tippling, Pagan philosophically mixed himself a lonely solace. "Didn't suppose we'd be able to sleep a wink, did you, when you'd got us all excited up?"

"I! but how?"

"Pulling off this pussyfoot return of the prodigal."

"It is true," Lanyard thoughtfully considered: "by what appears, you did know of my return."

"If we hadn't, there wouldn't have been any sense in our staging this swell reception in your honour."

"I presume it seems stupid of me to be surprised—"

"Dear man!" Pagan benignly advised him—"we brought you back."

"I am afraid I am incurably stupid . . ."

"It was one of my boats you came north on from Rum Cay," Morphew brusquely explained. "If I hadn't given the boys down there the word by wireless, when they reported you'd turned up, you'd be there still, high and dry on the beach."

"Stupid," Lanyard insisted, "is too weak a term for my imbecility. And I never guessed—!"

"Never struck you it was funny," Morphew enquired in ponderous contempt, "a bootlegging outfit would let a total stranger get the low-down on the way the game was worked, and then give him free transportation North and turn him loose to tell all he knew to the enforcement gang?"

"One must confess one thought those fine fellows strangely trustful."

"You likely charged it all up to your winning little ways," Pagan sweetly observed over the rim of his tumbler. "Not that I want to rub it in . . ."

"But do go on. It is really a consolation to hear your wit improvise so brilliantly upon the theme of my infirmity—when I myself am at a loss for words."

"Like hell you are!" Pagan complained with an anguished grimace—"not so's anybody'd notice it."

"But still I find myself so feeble-minded," Lanyard confessed, "nothing yet gives me to understand why—"

Pagan started vivaciously to pursue the advantage which Lanyard conceded; but a baleful glance from Morphew reined his tongue in time, and drove him to bury a snubbed nose silently in strong drink.

"It's like this," Morphew began with consequence, but paused to clear his throat when Lanyard turned on him a look of bright attention. "I'm a hard guy to cross," he stated with the simplicity of a strong plain man—"a damned hard guy to cross, if you don't know it. What I make up my mind I want, I get"—a pause lent the next word weight—"always. Maybe I have to wait a while sometimes, but in the end I always get what I go after. Always."

"Spoken like a one-hundred per-cent he-citizen, monsieur, of this land of bred-in-the-bone go-getters."

"All right," Morphew replied, mysteriously tolerant. "I don't mind your funny cracks at me, if they amuse you. That's your line, and I'll say your right bright at it, too. It isn't mine, and maybe that's my misfortune: a person can't have everything in this world, that's sure . . . But somehow I notice, no matter how many laughs I miss when they're being handed around—somehow I always manage to bag the last one. I've let you get away with a lot of rough stuff at my expense, Lanyard, but I'm not done with you yet. If you'd only lay off being a comedian long enough to think things over, it ought to teach you something and make it easier for us to understand each other."

"But continue, I beg you, monsieur," Lanyard replied with a speciously straight face: "I am all attention, as you see."

Morphew darkly chewed his cigar for another moment . . . "I let my boys fetch you back to New York because I figured out maybe you'd had knocks enough to bring you round to a more docile frame of mind than you were in when you high-tailed it for South America." A side alley of self-revelation proved too tempting: "That's the way I am, you see: when a man I want bucks on me, I make it a rule to give him all the rope he wants to wind himself up in good and tight before I start hauling in the slack. That night we first met, now . . . I made you a plain, open-and-shut business proposition, take it or leave it. If you hadn't r'ared back, showed your teeth and the whites of your eyes, and made such a fuss altogether about your lovely virtue, I and you wouldn't 've ever had any trouble. If there's one thing I despise worse than poison it's phony righteousness. And the way you carried on that night showed me plain enough kind treatment wasn't ever going to gentle you. So I laid off and let you perform. What happened?"

"Must we go into that? See: you're embarrassing Mr. Pagan here frightfully."

Morphew gave his head a shake, as one pestered by a buzzing insect. "What happened?" he obstinately iterated. "You went off and got loaded on a thimbleful of liquor, forgot all about being nature's nobleman, and pulled off one of the rawest jobs of second-storey stuff ever."

"But surely you are dealing unfairly now by the talents of that poor but willing creature Mallison."

"Mallison!"

A passion of indignation exploded in that snort, such as Morphew had never before betrayed capacity for feeling; and seeming to choke on a rush of words, he was temporarily unable to resume; while Lanyard, forbearing to question or comment, continued in a wide stare of a sudden grown genuine. Unmistakably his mention of Mallison had touched a spot so sore that the iron rule of stolidity had been unseated. But for an instant only; quick to pull himself together, Morphew resumed his level drone of habit.

"Get that idea out of your head—if it's in it. Mally's a crooked little damn' fool if there ever was one, but he never in his best days had the guts to tackle big business."

"But, if memory serves, you were of another mind when we met at Mrs. McFee's—"

"You had me at a disadvantage—"

"How generous an admission!"

"It was your word against mine; and what chance did I have of proving you had everything all wrong, with the little McFee daft about you, ready to believe black was white if you told her so?"

"It isn't fair to confuse me with compliments. Pardon a slight digression: I am interested to know what became of Mallison."

"I don't know," Morphew admitted, louring. "But I will before long . . ."

He gave a minute to savage brooding. "If that boy had only had sense enough to trust me . . . But he got panicky for fear we'd fall down trying to alibi him, and blew without so much as good night."

"And you have not see him since?"

"Fat chance. He knows enough to steer clear of me after jumping the bail I put up for him."

"Still, one is hardly convinced that Mallison is the simple innocent you make him out to be."

"I suppose"—Morphew's manner was irritating by intention—"what you want me to believe is you don't remember owning up you done that job yourself."

"Ah!" Light from yet another angle promised now to illuminate the darker recesses of Liane's duplicity. "You have been talking with Mademoiselle Delorme—"

"With both of you."

"Pardon?"

"I'm telling you the three of us talked all that business over, I and you and Liane, half a dozen times if once, last Winter. You didn't make any bones then about admitting you'd turned that trick at Folly's while you were lit. What good do you think it's going to do you to stall about it now, try to feed the bull to me, the way you did to Liane on board that boat? Maybe she swallowed your yarn because she wanted to; but I'm no crazy woman, I'm not so dead struck on you I'll let you get away with telling me to my face you don't remember anything that went on in this Town before you went South. I'm wise, I know what you've got in mind; and that tale won't go down a little bit with yours truly."

"I see . . ."

"Well," Morphew roughly insisted: "what do you see?"

"For one thing, that one was not mistaken in assuming you had recently talked with Mademoiselle Delorme."

"Why not? She hiked right back to Town as soon as you left her flat on the Port Royal."

"And promptly reported to you of course."

"Who do you think? What other friend did her and you have, with pull enough to keep the cops off your backs while you were running that continuous performance of yours last Winter?"

"Nevertheless, your influence failed to save Liane from deportation."

"She came back all right, she's here now, isn't she? Well then: who do you suppose fixed things up for her?"

"Pardon, monsieur: I do but marvel that power so autocratic should even once have failed a friend."

"Pretending you've forgotten all about how that happened, too, eh?" An uglier sneer overcast Morphew's countenance. "I suppose you don't remember anything about how you two got to feeling your oats, after you'd been Lone Wolfing a while and making a good thing out of it with my protection, and thought you could give me the air and never miss me—"

"No! not really?"

"I suppose you don't remember how I nudged the Government into deporting Liane to teach her discipline and then, when I found you didn't handle any better with her away, let her sneak back, gave you another chance, and when that didn't work made Town so hot for you both you had to take a running jump off the Battery . . . I suppose it's only natural you wouldn't remember little things like that."

"And very handsome it is of you to suppose so, and prove you do by itemizing in such minute detail all I pretend to have forgotten."

"That line of talk won't get you anywhere with me, Lanyard. Sarcastic cracks won't stop me checking up to show you where you get off trying to pull that lost memory stall on me. Why!" Morphew snorted in disgust—"you must think I'm easy."

"But no, monsieur! my memory is hardly so bad as all that."

"It's only on the blink when you want it to be, I guess."

"What it really needs now," Pagan put in with animation, "is for you to get yourself lammed over the bean again." He grasped the neck of the decanter suggestively. "I hate to do it, but for a friend . . . Just say the word, Lanyard, and I'll crown you King of Cracksmen."

"Shut up," Morphew brutally snapped.

With a little moan the sycophant applied himself anew to the soothing Scotch; and for a few moments no more was said, while Lanyard, sitting forward, bent a thoughtful frown to the rug at his feet, and Morphew studied his man with a subtile smile.

"Licked," he declared, at length: "that's what you are, Lanyard, licked to a standstill. Your nature started the job and I finished it. You'd ought to 've known better than to try to buck a combination like that."

"I'm sorry," Lanyard replied, looking up with an apologetic smile—"but if it isn't too much to ask you to be more plain-spoken . . ."

"All I mean is—there's no cure for a crook. If you were born crooked, you'll die a crook, no matter how hard you struggle. It's your nature, and it's no use any man's trying to lick his nature: you're licked before you start. God knows I don't blame you for not wanting to believe that, on account of that dame you were stuck on—"

"By your leave, monsieur!" Lanyard sharply insisted—"we will not discuss that phase of my affairs."

"Just as you like. No offense intended, none, far's I'm concerned, taken." Morphew had suddenly shifted to an amazingly conciliatory line. "I bear you no ill will, Lanyard, in spite of all you've done to sprain my patience. Why! that battle you put up against your nature and me was a classic, and a man can't help but admire you for it, even if he did know all along you never had a chance. But now you know it, too, you're too sensible to keep on kicking against the pricks. Your motto from now on is 'Make the best of it'—and the best you can make of it, if you put your back into the business, is the life of Reilly for a man who knows how to live like you do."

"You advise me, then—?"

"I leave it to your good sense, seeing where you stand today, what's the only sensible way for you to go."

In a subdued voice, with thoughtful gaze constant to Morphew's, Lanyard repeated: "Where I stand today!"

"Well: where do you? You've got to live somehow, and you only know one way to make a decent living. It's no good your pulling out for Paris or London again. They read the papers over there, too—they'll never let the Lone Wolf land from any steamer."

"But if they believe me drowned in the Bahamas—"

"Don't count on it," Morphew earnestly counselled. "If you try to shift your scene of operations, somebody over here that maybe doesn't think you've treated him right would be sure to tip off Scotland Yard and the Surétè. See what I mean?"

"You make it all so clear . . ."

"Now on this side you've got everything in your favour. You're back in Town, and nobody knows it but Pagan here and me; all you've got to do is lay low a while, take things easy, and go ahead when you get good and ready . . . providing you're ready to come to terms with me."

"Terms such as—?"

"The same as last Winter; you do the heavy lifting and I take care of the high finance; we split the proceeds fifty-fifty, and you get full protection thrown in for nothing."

"But what of this plagiarist of my methods who has been so active in my absence?"

"Don't let him worry you. I've got a good line on that bird, he won't stand in your light twenty-four hours after I switch on the stop signal."

Over the head which Lanyard bowed in pondering, Pagan shot Morphew a grin of cynical congratulation, to which Morphew returned a quick nod and sign of caution.

"Take your time, think it over," he advised, not unkindly; "I don't want to hurry you. But it's only fair to tell you, after all that's passed between us, Lanyard, I'd think myself a born sap to take you back on the old terms without conditions."

"It might be well to name them," Lanyard suggested without looking up.

"To begin with, from now on the Delorme is out, I and you will work without any go-between. And then—you'll admit it's only fair I should want some proof of good faith from you."

"For example—?"

"I want the say-so about your first few jobs. You'll have to tackle them under conditions that'll satisfy me you mean to play the game on the level."

"But I fancy you will find it hard to invent such conditions—"

"Oh!" Morphew almost genially laughed—"it's proof of good will I'm after more than anything else. If it comes to that, you won't double-cross me, once you've committed yourself, unless you want to spend the rest of your born days in Sing-Sing or . . ."

The short laugh that filled in the ellipsis brought Lanyard's eyes up to Morphew's once more. "Or—?" he prompted with interest.

"There are some things I don't like to say, when we seem to be hitting it off so nice and easy. I was only thinking—I guess you realize you wouldn't get a great ways with your life if you tried to sell me out again. For instance: Say we should fall out here tonight; know what I'd do?"

"How should I?"

"I'd call in the boys waiting out there in the hall, have 'em give you a full shave, and turn you loose at Forty-second and Fifth Avenue, while I sat on the steps of the Public Library and split my sides laughing."

"Very ingenious," Lanyard gravely applauded. "But assuming, purely for the sake of the argument, that by means of some equally ingenious shift I should escape unshorn . . ."

"Remember how long you lasted in November, after you'd told me to roll my hoop? Must have been all of twenty-four hours."

"Decidedly," Lanyard observed, "I was unwise to mention murder in your hearing—or would have been, had I seriously entertained any notion of holding out against you, monsieur."

Exultation flickered in Morphew's eyes like northern lights in a moon-blanched sky.

"Then it's a bargain?"

"You would not have wasted time offering it had you thought me insane enough to reject it." Lanyard lifted a hand to plead for silence, while the mellow music of a clock in the hall sang through the early morning stillness. "Five o'clock," he said, rising. "Since we are to be so closely associated henceforth, monsieur, I trust it isn't too much to beg the favour of a bed. It has indeed been a long day for me, my head at present is so dull with drowsiness I am hardly in a condition to go further into this new arrangement . . ."

XX

The sleepiness that Lanyard alleged was no mere subterfuge to end a wearing conversation, the fatigue he felt was all too real, harvest of many toilful days and nights of broken rest, so real that, once he ceased to stave off its creeping paralysis with inflexible resistance, it overwhelmed him of a sudden altogether. It was with something very like the carriage of a somnambulist that he permitted the still sprightly Peter Pagan to lead him from the library, through a maze of corridors and stairs apprehended as in dream, and leave him at last in a lordly bedchamber.

Here by early dawn-light he undressed like an automaton, fell across the bed rather than laid him down upon it, and in a trice was sleeping heavily. . . .

The sun grew so old its level rays struck in at length beneath the window awning and burned his face with a crimson glare till Lanyard started up, bemused, out of a nightmare of stokehold drudgery—only to fancy himself, with that ruddy beam boring through blue shadow to lend colour to the illusion, back in his stateroom on the Port Royal, waiting for the pretty person of Liane Delorme to justify her knuckling of the door.

But nobody had knocked, the band of raw red gold was stationary that barred the dusk, it was a bed that held him, not a berth, the spacious sleeping quarters of a pampered landlubber were his instead of cramped and bare accomodations aboard an ocean-going boat; and he was quickening to apprehensions of a plight more exigent even than that which Liane had come to tell him of upon that other nightfall, in the Bahamas, weeks ago; by courtesy a guest in the town-house of a new-found ally, in fact no better than a prisoner in the stronghold of his most embittered enemy . . .

Fagged though he had been all through that parley of the small hours, Lanyard had likewise been far too thoroughly alive to its vital bearing upon the issue of whether or not this life of his were worth the struggle, to have slighted any innuendo in Morphew's attitude, however trivial in seeming or elusive. And now recalling, weighing and minutely searching every spoken word and unsaid implication, he perceived no reason for reconsidering his verdict on their consequence, that Morphew's proposal of an alliance had been as treacherous as his own complaisance toward it. . . . A memory the cause of corroding chagrin, to him who had never before met offer of oppression with less than flat defiance, to whom the bare thought of compromise with an overbearing and corrupt antagonist was one to sicken over. He had sour comfort of the saying that it's fair to fight the devil with fire, he would liever have known himself surely the poor thing they pictured him, uncontrollably subject to criminal lapses, than to remember he had been reduced to trafficing with cattle such as Morphew—and on terms of Morphew's choice!

Yet it had been that or worse—a knife in his back, very likely, before he could find out the truth for himself about those latterday prowlings of the Lone Wolf that enemy and friend alike attributed to Michael Lanyard, that the friendliest guesses ascribed to the cropping out of ingrained criminal proclivities which the best will in the world might neither eradicate nor hope to hold in check.

God knew it might be true! and if it were, then it was time indeed to let Society rid itself of such a menace. But first all doubts must be resolved . . .

Morphew had had the best of him from the outset, had chosen the ground, forced the fighting, outgeneralled him in every skirmish, beaten him down at last to his knees, forced him to stomach quarter on conditions unspeakably humiliating. But better to bow to such abasement than forfeit every chance to clear his scutcheon or, failing, tear him down whose malevolence had been the first cause of its smirching, down from the strong place he had set up to be his refuge, and bury him deep in its ruins—though these bury not Morphew alone.

To compass an end so just, to avenge society as he revenged himself, was the one way Lanyard could conjecture to make amends for being as life had made him; to this he dedicated himself without any reservation whatever, renouncing every cherished prejudice against unfaith and double-dealing, holding no sacrifice whether of scruples or of life itself too heavy a price to pay for its accomplishment, refusing to know any depth of degradation to which he would not gladly descend with the promise that at the bottom he would find Morphew's throat defenseless.

Intuition gave one gleam of hope. Making no claim to the ability to read Morphew's mind, Lanyard assumed with confidence to assay his manner; and recreating this to his mental vision, as it had been manifest in last night's rencontre, estimated every facet of it false. Morphew only too possibly might have been sincere in all he had asserted concerning the recrudesence of the Lone Wolf in the flesh of Michael Lanyard; but his honest scorn, paraded for what he professed to consider disingenuous efforts to hide behind a claim of lost memory, had been in Lanyard's judgment sheerest sham, paste indignation donned for the occasion and, by that token, for some sly purpose. Morphew had taken too much humbling at Lanyard's hands to spare him without some compensating end in view, not conceivably a sordid one alone. If in actual need of money he was little likely to reject it unless Lanyard and none other, operating as a burglar, earned it for him. Power such as he pretended to, intelligently exerted, could hardly have failed to bring to heel that enterprising understudy of the Lone Wolf, who had been so busy all the while that Lanyard had been becalmed in the Bahamas, and bend him to Morphew's purposes as Morphew now proposed to bend Lanyard. So it seemed not unreasonable to assume that the use which Morphew had for Lanyard was another than he avowed, some end that Lanyard alone of all men could serve, therefore not an end of simple avarice—in short, nothing but the satisfaction of some all-absorbing private passion.

Morphew knew, and knew that Lanyard knew—must have known, or was a denser dunce than Lanyard thought him—that last night's compact had been a farce, that neither of them meant to abide by it one moment longer than suited his convenience, and finally that so long as Lanyard lived and had his liberty Morphew's own liberty if not his very life was in jeopardy. Yet he had preferred that risk . . .

A man so ruled by his passions was surely vulnerable: it remained to bide one's time with every wit wide awake to catch and profit by the first clue that Morphew might let fall, then strike with all the shrewdness one could muster at the weak spot so exposed. Lanyard would hardly have to school himself to patience very long . . .

Arrived at this conclusion, scarcely one to content him, nevertheless the one with which he must for the time being be content, Lanyard permitted considerations of more material sort to assert their claims, with the promptly resultant discovery that he was both sticky and hungry, in sore need of a bath and breakfast. And sitting up, he made another discovery, that his privacy had not been respected while he slept. His weatherbeaten wardrobe had vanished from the chair over which he had thrown it on going to bed; in its place he found a flowered dressing-gown of thinnest silk and a pair of bedroom slippers—a costume supremely suited to such sultry weather, as long as one remained indoors. He perceived himself to be indeed a prisoner.

In the bathroom still a third discovery awaited him when, having turned on the hot-water tap in the tub, he had his first look at himself in the mirror above the washstand. Mirrors had been rare furniture of the scenes in which his life had been staged of late, and he was interested to view the effect of a six weeks' untamed growth of beard, had been rather looking forward to revising it, as soon as he could lay hands on a sharp pair of scissors, into a neat Van Dyke, a style calculated to be more becoming and hardly less disguising. But one glance showed him that Morphew or another had been beforehand with him, had played Delilah to his Samson while he slept; that wanton luxuriance had been edited already and in such vandal spirit that nothing could now be done for it but shave it off entirely.

Scissors had been left on the glass shelf below the mirror, together with a razor, soap and a brush. In resignation Lanyard clipped and shaved, telling himself that it wouldn't do to resent the impertinence—not yet—it was just Morphew's delicate way of serving notice that Lanyard must not count on any liberty of action unhandicapped by constant danger of being identified with the original of that confounded flashlight, in other words, that any attempt to elude his watchful care would be extremely impolitic.

Later, while he wallowed in hot water, Lanyard heard footfalls in the bedchamber, then a discreet voice just outside the bathroom door.

"I beg pardon, sir, but I thought I heard you moving about. Mr. Morphew's compliments, and you'll be dining out of Town tonight with him and Mr. Pagan; the car is ordered for seven o'clock."

"That's very interesting—thank you. What time is it now?"

"Just on six, sir. I've laid out your dinner clothes, and now, if you wish, I'll fetch your coffee. Perhaps you'd care for grapefruit, too, and a bit of toast."

"I'm sure I would, thanks, especially if I'm in for anything of a drive."

"That I can't tell you, sir—Mr. Morphew didn't say."

By the time Lanyard had finished towelling, his breakfast was waiting. He consumed it in a thoughtful turn, eyeing the array of clothing provided for him, hoping that the tailor who presumably had taken his measure while he slept had been a better man at his trade than the barber who had operated on his beard. But misgivings were groundless; the dinner-coat, most ungainly of garments when it isn't just right, turned out to be a very tolerable fit, and he could not complain of a shortage of anything he required to make him feel entirely at ease—barring money. Even a cigarette-case and a wafer-thin watch with chain of platinum had been fitted into the waistcoat pockets.

Finding himself dressed with twenty minutes to spare, he had the curiosity to try the door. It wasn't locked. He went down the stairs deliberately, expecting at every step to encounter Morphew or Pagan or else discover some servant spying on him. But nothing of the sort: everything was being done to beguile him into believing he was entirely at liberty on his own recognizance. He knew too much, however, to act on any such rash assumption.

He met nobody, for that matter, either in the halls or in the living-rooms, and was twirling lonesome thumbs in the library of mortifying associations when the clock chimed the hour, and promptly the servant who had waited on him upstairs put in appearance, bringing a hat of black felt and a slender stick of ebony, ivory-capped.

"The car is waiting, sir, if you are quite ready."

"Quite—thanks. But Mr. Morphew and Mr. Pagan?"

"They are neither of them at home, sir. I believe it is their intention to meet you wherever it is you are to dine—the chauffeur will know."

"Then I'm to make the trip alone?"

"Yes, sir."

A certain quality of cheek in the way Morphew had made his arrangements won an ungrudged laugh as Lanyard accepted the hat and stick.

The Rolls-Royce landaulet at the door was so brightly blue and sleek it might have been making its first run from the show-room floor. The liveried footman who held its door with all the rare poise of his kind, saluted smartly as Lanyard got in, and smartly doubled round the car to hop up to the chauffeur's side: the vehicle began to move almost before he was formally posed in his place with folded arms. But Lanyard remarked that the rear-view mirror above the wheel was so tilted as to afford the driver a view of the tonneau; and knew by this that to discover symptoms of intending unceremoniously to leave the car would be unwise.

At the same time he inclined to dispute the wisdom that had provided a progress of so much state and ostentation for one so badly wanted; for while it was true enough that the police in uniform were far too busy supervising the traffic of the Drive to have room in their heads for thoughts of the Lone Wolf, it was equally true that plain-clothes men were presumed to be aboard and on the qui vive, it wasn't an extravagant flight of fancy that supposed a chance crossing of trails, a casual look into the car fixing on the features of its passenger and kindling with recognition . . .

But when furtive reconnaissance astern, at intervals in the course of the first twenty minutes, had satisfied him that the landaulet was being discreetly dogged by another car, an unpretentious affair in sober paint occupied by three men of competent presence, compact bodies who rode with eyes alert, and looked quite capable, jointly and severally, of giving a good account of themselves in action, he concluded that it wasn't worth his while to worry about adventitious interference on the part of the police, who, if inspired to such an attempt, would stand about as much chance of stopping the Rolls-Royce and arresting its tenant as the latter would of winning his freedom by means of a flying leap. One might as profitably occupy one's leisure trying to guess one's destination: and the next hour satisfied Lanyard that the route had been mapped with intent to confuse him. For after following main-travelled ways to White Plains, the landaulet and its satellite struck off into a bewildering tangle of back-country roads in which, as night closed down, it was easy to lose one's sense of direction. Lanyard could only surmise that they were describing a circuitous course to the North and East of Greenwich.

It was hilly countryside they traversed, for the most part thinly settled. Long stretches of lonely road spaced infrequent clusters of farm buildings and crossroad communities. Few other vehicles were encountered. The Rolls-Royce seldom slowed down to forty miles an hour, while the following car closed up till its headlamps lighted brilliantly both sides of the landaulet, rendering it out of the question as well as foolhardy to seek to leave the latter unobserved by a sudden dive into the dark.

Not that Lanyard entertained the remotest desire to commit his fortunes to a hope so forlorn, he was too well possessed by curiosity concerning the nature of the scheme which Morphew was maturing, for Lanyard's introduction to which he had plotted an approach so tortuous, and which that evening could hardly fail to declare. It wasn't in reason that the man should take so much trouble to manufacture an atmosphere of mystery without a purpose of uncommon moment. And if it were true that he had some more than ordinarily devilish project brewing, Lanyard would feel cruelly slighted if denied a chance to get at least a peep into it.

Something after nine the cars picked their way through the outskirts of a town of good size, then found a by-road through open country fragrant with the breath of salt water, leading on to infer that Long Island Sound could not be far away. Properties jealously enclosed in walls or wrought-iron fences bordered the road, occasional gateways opened up fleeting vistas of drives that led toward lighted windows in the distance. Apparently a community of wealthy land-holders . . .

The landaulet turned in at last between two stone piers supporting handsome iron gates, and followed a winding drive through spacious lawns, dimly revealed by starlight, to a porte-cochère. The footman jumped down to the door, Lanyard alighted. As he ascended steps leading to a broad veranda, he heard the Rolls-Royce purr away behind him, and saw the headlights of its attendant car sweep down the drive that curved round to the rear of the house.

The veranda was lighted only by windows opening on it that diffused a gentle glow at best upon patches of flooring set with summer furniture, and deepened the gloom of the spaces intervening. The house was silent, nobody moved in an imposing entrance-hall that was visible through screen doors; and Lanyard pulled up, at a loss for his welcome.

That came, however, without too much delay: a low sweet laugh lifting up from the darkness between the two nearest windows, then a small shape of beauty and gracious animation running swiftly toward him with both hands extended.

He caught them with an exclamation of pleasure, and stood looking in wonder into the smiling eyes of Folly McFee.

XXI

Neither less nor more the dupe of vanity than most men of his years, Lanyard rather liked to think of himself as one whom life had lessoned out of all susceptibility to such emotions as that of surprise, a creature of sophistication cynical but bland, weathered by arduous experience and long contemplation of man the slave of folly and the feeble sport of chance until nothing could amaze him. But this contretemps (he couldn't count it better, remembering the genius of its machinery) flawed the picture; Folly's accents with their more than half-pretended petulance startled him awake to the fact that he had been holding her hands for minutes, gaping like a zany, speechlessly confounded.

"I don't believe you're glad to see me!"

"And I—I'm wondering if I am."

"That's not a very pretty speech," she pouted, tugging at her hands till he had to resign them.

"But everything considered, not an unnatural one. You must know nothing had prepared me . . ."

"That's good—because I'd be dreadfully cross if anything had spoiled the surprise."

"Then you can't be cross with me at all."

"I don't know . . ." the young woman gravely doubted. Instinct with that quenchless spirit of coquetry in default of which she had not been Folly, she posed provocatively to him in the half-light of the window behind her, head daintily aslant, elfin mischief glinting through the dusk that masked her eyes. "I must say you might take it more kindly, seeing how happy it makes me. You don't know how long you've kept me waiting—I'd begun to be afraid you'd backed out of coming after all."

"Then you actually were expecting me for dinner?"

"Of course! without you it wouldn't really be a party."

So much for the suspicion that his escort had mistaken the way and blundered into the wrong premises . . . Then it behooved him to have his wits about him and beware of being misled into taking false steps on such false ground.

"You're an arrant young baggage," Lanyard considered aloud.

"I know—but you're an old hand."

"Then cultivate a bit of reverence for my grey hairs, remember it's not seemly to make mock of your elders."

"Come and sit down, then, beside me." With a chuckle of delight Folly flitted back into the shadows from which she had come, plumped down upon a settee, and patted its vacant cushions with a peremptory hand as Lanyard more deliberately followed. "Do you always insist on having a plot to explain why people request the honour of your presence at their dinners?"

"I have a humble heart," Lanyard protested, sitting; "I am too much mystified to understand why it's termed an honour . . ."

"You're a great bluff—I've told you before. You know very well, most of the people one meets are incurably dull, whereas nothing can cure you of being a most interesting person. That's one reason at least why you're wanted."

"But you are dodging my question. Few people think it an honour to entertain the Lone Wolf—even if they didn't entertain him unawares."

"I don't call that humour," Folly observed, critical. "You can't amuse me by making believe you think I take any stock in all the rotten things people say about you."

"Oh!" Lanyard blankly cried—"you really don't?"

"I should say not—know you better."

Her tone rang true enough, and Lanyard could detect nothing to contradict it in the soft silhouette of her profile against the light.

"It makes me very happy, to think at least one person in the world has faith in me, after all the villainy that's been charged to my account."

"That isn't fair," Folly retorted with spirit: "You never give your friends credit—Morphy doesn't believe it, and neither does Peter."

"To be sure . . . Yes: naturally those two must have talked to you about me."

"You don't suppose they'd have lured you out here to dinner without first getting my permission, do you? If they hadn't, I'd hardly have been so fussed about your being late."

"But that wasn't my fault. I didn't know where I was coming—I could only comfort myself with the reminder that I was in the hands of—as you point out—my friends."

"It doesn't matter. We arranged to make it a late dinner anyway; and furthermore you're not the one who's kept it waiting. Morphy and Peter didn't show up till about ten minutes ago. They had a breakdown or something on the way."

"I was wondering . . ."

"They're upstairs in their rooms now, dressing."

"I hope they don't hurry," Lanyard confessed. "I can spare them a little longer, need time to get my bearings."

"Poor dear!" Folly closed an impulsive hand over Lanyard's. "It is horrid of me to plague you, isn't it? But you know how I love fun . . ." She drew away and made herself prim and meek in her corner. "It's your turn now, I'm perfectly well aware I've got questions by the broadside coming. You may fire when ready."

"But I think you know too well what seems most strange to me . . ."

"All right. I don't mind telling . . . Yes: this is my place. No: I don't own it, I just rent it furnished. From Peter Pagan. He's been such a dear, let me have it for next to nothing for the Summer, and the most perfect staff of servants thrown in."

"I'm sure that sounds just like him."

Lanyard meant it. Since it was manifest that Morphew and Pagan were determined to pluck this poor foolish pigeon, and she was madly bent on being plucked, certainly it had been their book to surround her with a squad of servitors trained to their purpose.

"But that isn't what's most perplexing to you . . ."

"By no means."

"You're perfectly eaten alive by curiosity to know how Morphy got round me, aren't you? Well! but how did he get round you?"

Lanyard weakly parried: "Hasn't he told you?"

"Not in so many words. But of course I understand. How could anybody hold out against such magnanimity?"

"How indeed?"

"You weren't to blame for being so cruelly wrong about him . . . about Mallison and Morphy's having had anything to do with my emeralds, I mean. Everything looked so black for him . . . Even Morphy didn't blame you; only, of course, he was half wild at the time, when you didn't give him a chance to defend himself and prove that Mallison had abused his confidence just as he had mine, only more so. But of course he's told you all about that."

"I am none the less interested to learn what he told you."

"Just what I've said, what you know. He waited weeks before he tried to see me again, and spent simple sloughs of money on detectives, trying to find Mallison and bring him back to prove what an ingrate he'd been. Oh! but I wasn't the only one of Morphy's friends that had suffered through taking Mallison on his endorsement."

"I am sure you were not."

"And then, when he had to give that up as hopeless, he got Liane to ask me to give him a chance to explain; and of course, I could hardly refuse to listen. And he's been just wonderful to me ever since. Really, my friend, you don't know what a fine nature he has. Why! he wouldn't let Liane or Peter tell me a word about what he was doing for you, it was only today I wormed the whole story out of him, after he had brought me the good news."

"'Good news'?"

"About your recovery. And when I think of how he took care of you, all those months, after that terrible motor accident, all the while you were out of your head and the doctors held out no hope you would ever be yourself again—when I think of the way he fought to save your mind—and won!—well!" Folly submitted in a voice of awe—"there aren't any two ways of looking at it: Morphy's a sportsman if there ever was one."

"He is," Lanyard cautiously conceded—"unique."

The young woman sat up with an indignant jerk. "Is there a double meaning to that?" she demanded. "Because if there is—I ought to warn you—you'll end by making me dislike you against my will. Oh! I know Morphy has his shortcomings; but so have we all. And I can't believe you so ungrateful . . ."

"But I would be the last man to deny that I owe Morphew a great deal," Lanyard was able to state with entire sincerity. "And some day—it is my dearest hope some day to be able to repay him as he deserves."

"That's all right, then." Mollified, Folly relaxed. "I'm terribly glad."

"Is it fair to ask why?"

"Because I want you to like him . . . for my sake, you know."

"Afraid I don't know."

"He hasn't told you?"

"I begin to be afraid to ask more questions."

A small gurgle of vanity bubbled out of the shadows. Then Folly thrust a hand into the golden flood that fell through the windows beyond the settee. Upon her third finger a great cabochon emerald shone with soft, unwinking fire.

"It's the finest stone of its kind on this side of the Atlantic," its wearer declared, "outside of my collection. That is, it was outside till Morphy gave it to me."

"You mean—you can't mean you're going to be married—!"

"I don't see what else it can mean—do you?—when we're engaged."

"But are you really in love—?"

"Now really, Mr. Lanyard! do you think it's polite to be so bowled over by the very idea that Morphy could have fallen in love with simple little me?"

"But you—?"

"Well . . ." The suppliant accents of a child caught misbehaving confessed: "you know I've always been crazy about emeralds."

Lanyard let a little space of silence be eloquent for him. When he spoke again it was in another tone, rather a brusque one: "But why the devil did you do that?"

"Oh, I don't know!" Folly sighed in plaintive resentment of such bullying. "He kept asking me, and I didn't know what else to do . . . You weren't there, and I was lonely, and it was raining . . ."

XXII

With the portentous sweep of a sorcerer's wand one wing of the screen doors nearby swung wide to deliver to Lanyard's stunned recognition the last person in the world he had cared to see just then, a presence of florid allurement en grande toilette. He rose in resignation, telling himself he might have been better prepared, would have been had Folly's most recent confidence broken upon his understanding with force less scandalizing—that the interruption was after all timely, since beyond doubt it saved him from speaking his mind too plainly on the theme of Morphew as a husband meet for Folly.

The woman at the doorway waited a moment for her vision to accomodate itself to the change of light, then marked him where he stood by the settee and approached with a carriage whose measured grace matched the play of the fantastic fan of plumes she managed, her fine body sinuously undulant within its scanty sheath of lace and satin.

"It is you at last, my friend. One fancied it was your car one heard. . . . But how long since last we met!"

"Too long," Lanyard gallantly insisted, performing a punctilious bow over a hand whose fingers tightened upon his with a significance unsentimental, a brief sharp squeeze that carried a clear message to his discretion: Folly, he was to understand, knew nothing, and Liane for reasons personal and sufficient held it wise she should continue to know nothing, of that ill-fated flight of theirs together to the Bahamas.

By way of supplement the throaty voice pursued with heavier stress on the note of professional blandishment: "It is true, then, you have missed me?"

"Ah!" Lanyard gave back agreeably to her humour—"if you only knew!"

"Hark to that grand blageur!" Liane grumbled to Folly. "Who would believe, to hear him, the last time we met he coldly spurned my love? But it is always so with him, one never knows how to take this fickle animal. Heed what I tell you, who have suffered: do not let him break your heart, too."

"But he has already," Folly stated, deceitfully demure. "If it wasn't for him I would never have had any practice throwing myself at a man's head and falling flat on my foolish face."

"I am too much confused," Lanyard claimed on behalf of his modesty. "These unmaidenly confidences oblige me to change the subject kindly but with decision. Permit me to observe at a venture how ready we aliens are to adopt the tribal customs of this great country, such as the rite of Old Home Week. Tonight, for example, our little circle is completely reunited—with one lamentable defection—"

"Oh, hush!" Folly caught his arm with an imploring hand. "Here comes Morphy; don't let him hear us, the mere mention of Mallison's name makes him simply frantic."

"On your account I promise to be careful. But you really must take the good man in hand and teach him self-control. As your husband, he will be sure to need it."

Folly's eyes flashed up in mute prayer and warning: Morphy leaving the swing-door, was already within earshot. In his wake, as ever at no great distance, the inevitable Pagan strutted.

With that dogged elasticity of gait which men of too certain years and too, too solid flesh affect in their pathetic strivings to seem youthful to the women they prefer, Morphew approached, his dinner clothes, over-cleverly tailored, decked out with a regalia of jewels more than ordinarily shocking, last night's surly truculence now a genial suavity that harked back to the first half-hour of his acquaintance with Lanyard, at the Clique Club so long ago. On his very best behavior, he was apparently charmed to be so. And observing him in covert wonder when, after throwing Liane a light but friendly greeting, he bent his lips to Folly's hand, Lanyard perceived in a blinding flash of divination the chink in the armor of this uncouth colossus: Morphew was madly in love, in bondage absolute to one of those late blooming passions that men know who feel their flesh, still warm from the midday sun, breathed upon by chill premonitions of the night to come.

"Ah, Lanyard, my boy! there you are, eh?" No friend of his heart ever gave Lanyard a more cordial hand. "Sorry Pete and I had to keep you waiting—"

"But I was glad of the chance to find myself in relation to the surprise you had prepared for me—the surprises, I mean."

A small bow comprehended Liane, who returned an arch look as Folly linked her arm and snuggled.

"Darling Liane is stopping with me for the looks of the thing, to keep my name sweet on the tongue of my neighbours."

"Pour les convenances," Liane interpreted for Lanyard with an intonation inimitably droll.

Dinner was announced . . .

Long before that meal was finished Lanyard knew the conviction that never had he sat through a stranger, or one better composed and served, or consumed in an atmosphere of more general amenity.

It would have been anything but easy, for that matter, to be uncongenial under the influences of food of such excellence and so skillfully prepared, wines so well chosen, and the steady flow of high spirits contributed by Folly, Liane and Pagan in tacit collaboration, and encouraged by a surprising display of good feeling in the more saturnine Morphew. Yet Lanyard thought it doubtful if any of his company forgot self or selfish interests for one fleeting instant or pronounced a single unweighed witticism, however spontaneously it might seem to fall.

On his own part, he could not—had he wished—have forgotten the sinister tension of distrust and cross-purpose running through it all; and if he seemed to let himself go and enter without reserve into the frivolous spirit of the gathering, he remained in his heart an outsider to the end, captious and skeptical, and to the end a prey to dour forebodings. And his attention, ranging in turn from one to another, with a quality of vision inhumanly dispassionate stripped each and every one, even himself, of their trappings of pretension and self deception, and saw the rot that ate at every heart.

He saw in Pagan the perfect pattern of a parasite, fawning on all and sundry for empty laughter, that he might esteem himself a wit and so repair the abrasion of his self-love by the knowledge that he was, at bottom, no better than a pickthank and a pander.

He saw Liane Delorme estranged from these her boon accomplices of yesterday because of Morphew's inexplicable new animus, bitterly stung by the discovery that she who had ever been wont to queen it unchallenged was tonight being barely tolerated for what she might be worth toward the consummation of another's corrupt and ungenerous ends; haunted by the incidental knowledge that her charms were day by day more swiftly fading, that their potency once so magical was now nearly spent, and that the increase of her years had brought and would bring no compensating repose, neither the peace that crowns a life well lived nor any surcease from repining.

He saw Folly McFee, a trifling moth, vain, empty-headed, pretty-to-death, avid for admiration to dull the irk of discontent with life for all it had denied her of her heart's desire, for the shabby indemnity it offered her in the shape of Morphew as her promised husband.

He saw Morphew, gross in person, gross in appetites, seeking in vain to slake his lust for power, that men might look up to him, by fostering those puerile and unprofitable criminal intrigues of his incubation, and at the same time laid so low by love of a doll's face and a pretty body he could not dissemble his fatuous doting or the jealousy that made him sick to his core every time the amorous little baggage of his fancy chose to make eyes at another man.

Finally, Lanyard saw himself, to whom pride had once been as breath of life, broken and degraded to a shameful sort of peonage, constrained to take his orders from a Morphew and faithfully perform the tasks set for him, lest enemy and patron in one withdraw his favour and leave him without defense against the wrath of a society which his mere existence affronted beyond pardon.

Satyr and sycophant, coquette, courtesan and criminal: a shady crew . . .

And against that ring of worn and raddled faces present in actual being to his sight, hall-marked every one by self-seeking, he had ever before him a face infinitely more real and true, his vision of his lost love, beyond all telling fair and kind, never more near to him than now, nor ever more inaccessibly remote.

And these with whom he sat and dined and drank, with whom he laughed and leered and bandied ribald personalities, were they whose egoism had cost him Eve . . .

Dull rage smouldered in his bosom, he knew he was ripe for murder—and went on feeding and guzzling with them, winking and nudging and giggling with the best of them, put in his proper place by life at last, relegated to his rowdy sphere, to escape from which he had been insane ever to aspire . . .

Oh, he knew it now! Doubts no more vexed his mind. He was where he belonged, where his own acts had brought him, in the vicious circle of his peers, welcomed and accepted in virtue of the proof he had provided, though unconsciously and without intention, that he was one of them—"guilty as charged," guilty as Hell.

So be it—he was tired of fighting against the fate inherent in his failings, he would fight no more. The destiny of his own architecture must henceforth have its way with him. . . .

Quaint respect for the conventions of another world at length ordained the withdrawal of the women, leaving the men to the walnuts and wine of tradition. And Lanyard, when he got up with the others to bow Folly and Liane out of the room, returning to the table, drew his chair up to the end where Morphew presided.

The curious good nature of the Sultan of Loot was holding up in spite of his bereavement, the temporary defection of the apple of his eye; he felt free to declare the little party an unblemished success; and though he adhered strictly to his plain water régime, he didn't hesitate to hector the servants, who didn't need his hectoring, into producing from Folly's cellar for the delectation of Lanyard and Pagan the rarest of grandes champagnes.

"That's the stuff to go to the right spot," he asserted, with a glitter of envy in his moist eyes of an ex-tank. "Drink hearty, it won't hurt you any, and there's lashin's more where it came from—though you won't find half a dozen bottles between Maine and California, outside the stock I control."

"Monsieur is a rare judge, for one who never drinks."

"That isn't saying I never did." Vanity grew warm with reminiscence. "Haven't touched liquor in ten years, but my daily average is still high."

"But how seldom does one find a host who has foresworn drink so considerate of the palates of his guests."

"Stick around," Morphew countered in simple pride—and possibly, in Lanyard's judgment, with an arrière-pensée—"you'll find out a lot of things about me you don't know, before we part. Besides, tonight isn't every night . . ."

The pause of suspense was meant to provoke the question underlined by arching eyebrows: "No?"

"Want to put plenty of heart into you," Morphew jovially admitted, "so you can put it into your stuff tonight."

With reluctance Lanyard detached a ravished gaze from the amber contents of the glass which he had been holding up to the light. Knitting eyebrows now lent accent of apprehensiveness to the query: "My 'stuff'?"

"Sure thing, your stuff; your act, you know, your turn, your job, the little thing you do better'n anything else."

"Monsieur undoubtedly means my shop—the Lone Wolf's craft."

"Call it anything you like," Morphew graciously conceded—"you know what I mean."

"But—I think monsieur said something about tonight—"

"That's right. Tonight's the night."

With undisguised regret Lanyard put aside a barely tasted glass; whereupon Morphew made a noise of expostulation.

"When the Lone Wolf was at his best, monsieur, he never drank anything if he had work in view. I have had too much already, if I am to believe you are not jesting . . ."

"That's something else you're due to learn when you get to know me better—I never joke about serious matters."

"In effect, monsieur has a great deal in common with humanity," Lanyard observed with a straight face. "It would be interesting, none the less, to learn where he draws the line between the serious and the trivial."

"I guess you won't want to argue that point when you realize the proposition I've laid out for you tonight is one of the biggest contracts you ever tackled."

With a quiet smile in eyes that cast back across a gulf of years, Lanyard pronounced: "I wonder . . ."

"Oh, I know you were a hell-bender in your prime!" Morphew contended—"but when all returns are in you'll be ready to admit you never went up against anything bigger than this."

Did the ulterior thought faintly re-echo in that assertion? With a finesse of which no man was more truly master Lanyard continued to seem astray in by-paths of diverting retrospection while in reality concentrating keenly critical scrutiny upon Morphew's countenance.

Such pure malevolence as glimpsed in those lightless eyes, in spite of every artifice of hooded lids and webbing wrinkles, was hardly to be taken as the work of a thwarted will to dominate or of mortified egotism merely, but must have been the distillation of an even stronger passion, fear or . . .

"The haul you made of Folly's emeralds that night you were pie-eyed, was a wonder, or would have been if you hadn't lost your nerve; and some of the tricks you've turned since then have been pippins; but tonight's going to make history. You listen to me . . ."

But Lanyard didn't, he heard only a rumour of words whose sense made no impression upon faculties staggered by a thunderstoke of intelligence. The very elaboration of carelessness with which he had named Folly McFee had betrayed Morphew's guarded secret: brute jealousy was the fundamental cause of the hatred in which he held Lanyard, the blind insensate jealousy of an aging man who foresees the failure of his efforts to find in love of woman fuel for waning fires.

Sensitive as he must have been, with that abnormal and abominable sensitiveness from which men of his coarse fiber too often suffer, to the aversion which his caresses could not but excite, to her instinctive shrinking from even the greed of his regard, and conceiving her to entertain a tenderness for the more personable man, the more dashing figure that was clothed as well in the glamour of a wildly romantic history, and the man who most intolerably was his junior by many years, Morphew—the conjecture gained force of verified conviction in the light of this late disclosure—had decided upon Lanyard's death as the one sure means of healing Folly of her infatuation, and had decreed that it should be brought to pass as an act of justice, approved by custom and the law, meted out to Lanyard while he was engaged in the commission of a felony.

Thus at a stroke he would rid himself of one whom he hated and feared as both a rival in love and an irreconcilable menace to his more material fortunes, prove to Folly she had misplaced her admiration, and clear Hugh Morphew of all suspicion of complicity in that old offense of Mallison and the emeralds; he would even rehabilitate Mallison, if he had any further use for that one, if his indignation on account of Mallison's imputed ingratitude had not been all a blind.

And indeed it was not hard to see how well it would be for all concerned, it might be even for Lanyard himself—it might be even for Eve!—if he were to be found dead the next morning of a bullet fired by an honest man in legitimate defense of his home . . .

Well for Eve and well for himself if he should meet his end tonight! That thought hummed in Lanyard's head like the refrain of some old song that, once recalled, sings itself endlessly over and over to memory's ear. It intensified the sobriety with which he listened while Morphew laid bare the cheap articulation of his plot, but it was permitted to work no deeper treason; so that Lanyard might very well have been as he seemed, as Pagan and Morphew believed him to be, impressed to admiration by the finely dove-tailed ingenuity and the imaginative daring of the scheme complete.

"The next property to the west"—Morphew flirted an iridescent paw toward that quarter—"is the summer home of the Vandergrifts. Guess you must know who they are . . ."

"As well as you know the fame of Rothschild, monsieur."

"The whole damn family's there just at present: pa and ma Vandergrift—she's sporting most of the Russian crown jewels since the last strike tacked a few dollars per ton on to the cost of coal; the Duchess of Allborough, Theodosia Vandergrift that was, wearing the Allborough diamonds and pearls; Dudley Vandergrift and his wife—her father was Jules Cottier of Cottier's, the French jewellers—"

"But assume the Lone Wolf to be acquainted with the fame of Cottier's, monsieur."

"And a whole houseful of guests—you know the sort. Nobody worth less than eighteen millions is ever invited to one of the Vandergrift house parties, not because ordinary millionaires ain't good enough, but because they'd feel like poor boys at a husking. At a conservative figure there must be upwards of a million in jewels under that roof tonight that belongs to the Vandergrift clan alone. They take good care of it, too. Their guests can do as they please about their stuff, but all the Vandergrifts' goes into the big safe in the library every night. It was built into the walls when the house was put up, in Eighteen Eighty-five or thereabouts; that's a good enough line on the sort of box you've got to tackle, for a man that knows all you do about safe construction."

"It doesn't sound formidable, assuming your information to be accurate."

"It's accurate, all right; don't let that worry cramp your style. I've been buying up inside dope on this proposition for months, getting it all set for you—had it all but ready to slip you when Liane and you kicked over the traces last Spring. Well—we'd have had to wait awhile anyway for ma and pa Vandergrift to move to the country, and now it's a bigger thing than it would have been any time sooner. So no harm done."

"And this information you have collected?"

"Got it right here." Morphew worried a gold-mounted wallet out of one of his hip-pockets and sorted from its contents several sheets of onion-skin tissue dark with minute pen-work. "There you are: map of the grounds, plan of the house, diagram of the library showing locations of all lights and switches, full notes on the habits of the household—everything but the combination of the safe."

"We left that out on purpose, Lanyard," Pagan smirked across the cloth, "just to make it interesting for you."

Impatiently Morphew thrust the diagrams and notes into Lanyard's hands.

"Everything else you want to know is there. Give it all the once over as soon as you can—we haven't got time now, ought to be joining the ladies before long—and any questions you want to ask I'll try to answer."

"Many thanks." Lanyard shuffled the papers under a thoughtful frown. "There is only one question I need ask: These fabulously wealthy folk no doubt maintain a corps of night watchmen?"

"That's just where you're wrong," Morphew contradicted in triumph. "There's only one night watchman for the whole works; and he's held the job twenty years and got so old and confident—nothing having ever happened to make him earn his pay—he spends most of his time on duty asleep in a chair by the garage door. He's supposed to make his rounds every hour, but I've fixed it so he'll forget about the three o'clock trip this night anyway."

"You have fixed it?"

"Don't suppose I'm taking any chances of his having a spell of sleeplessness tonight, do you? When he goes to sit down in his favorite chair this time he's going to find a flask that's slipped by accidental purpose off somebody's hip, a flask more than half full of prime stuff."

"Why not quite full, monsieur?"

Morphew winked hideously and laid a finger to his nose. "If that bird sees somebody had a few pulls at it, he won't worry about whether it's prune juice or ill-natured alcohol."

"Forgive my stupidity; now I understand—the cunning hand of Monsieur Pagan will have been at work upon the contents of that flask. How far-sighted you are to keep a tame chemist. But how will the bottle find its way to the seat of the chair?"

"One of my boys will take care of that, of course."

"You have spies within the gates, then?"

"Haven't I just been telling you I never leave anything to chance?"

"But I should say you leave everything to nothing else, when you repose faith in the loyalty of human hearts. Trust one man with your life, and you forfeit all your right to sleep; trust two, you may count yourself already betrayed. Trust nobody: it is the rule that made the Lone Wolf what he was."

"But you're trusting me—"

"Pardon, monsieur," Lanyard smiled; "but—you will admit—under duress."

"Well! but I'm trusting you—"

"With a cordon of God knows how many spies posted about the Vandergrift residence, beyond, to see that I am not interfered with while at work."

"But that's only a commonsense precaution," Morphew uneasily growled.

"And likewise to see that I do not take it into my head to—how do you say it? double-cross you?—pocket my plunder and neglect to return."