CHAPTER III

She stretched out one arm, keeping Ten Euyck at the tips of her fingers. He seemed content to stay so, looking at her.

She was dressed in a trailing gown of silken tissue that was now gold, now silver, as the light took it; but the long vaporous slip beneath was of pale rose; molded to her motion and stirring with her breath, there dwelt in the gauze which covered her a perpetual faint flush. The stuffs were cut as low about the breast as if she had been some social queen, and her fair, pale arms were bare of gloves. Their adorable young flatness below the gleam of the slim, smooth shoulders, was now shimmered over and now revealed by short fringes of silver and gold, of cooler colored amber and crystal, which were their only sleeve; and these fringes hung about the borders of her gown and trembled into music as she moved. In the high-piled softness of her hair, diamonds glimmered like stars in a fair dusk; diamonds banded her brow in an inverted crescent; diamonds and topaz dropped in long pendants from her ears; diamonds and pearls clung round her arms; the restored necklace drooped down her breast, and the peep and shine of jewels glanced from her everywhere like glow-worms. She seemed to be clothed in fluctuant light, and yet it could not dim one radiance of her beauty. This was more than newly crowned; the rose was fully open; her loveliness had spread its folded wings and come into its own. There was no shyness now in those wide eyes; her spirit shone there, all in arms, and moved with a new and deeper strength in her young body. Very faintly, on the pure and delicate oval of her cheek, burned the soft, hot stain of rouge. This was the reality of the dear ghost, calling in the night with the rain upon its face; this was the pale girl in the gray suit who had once sat beside her mother in the corner of the coroner's office. It may be Ten Euyck thought of this; it may be she did.

"Well," she said, "have I made myself fine? Do I please you?"

He broke from his trance, took the lamp out of her hold, set it on the mantelshelf, and returned to her without a word.

"Pray speak!" she said; "I am all yours!"

"Christina!" he broke out, and caught and covered her hand with kisses.

"It is quite true. Do I do you credit?

"Look at me here,Look at me there,Criticize me everywhere—"

He leaned toward her and she swayed past him to the piano. Over her shoulder she sang to him—

"From head to feetI am most sweet,And most perfect and complete!"

She struck the chords a crash and whirled round to him with her hands in her lap. "Yes, it is quite true. From my head to my feet—" here she thrust forth through the music of the shaken fringe a slim gold shoe with its buckle winking up at him—"you have paid for every rag I stand in." Christina's accent upon the word "rag" suggested that she was accustomed to standing in something much better. "It would be hard if you were not suited. Would you like to go to your room a moment? It's all ready."

He must have considered this jabber at somewhat its true worth, for what he did was to draw up a chair and take and hold her hands. "Christina," said he, studying her face, "do you hate me so much?"

She remained a moment, silent. Then, "Yes!" she said. "I am a good hater!" And she smiled at him, a soft, stinging smile, with her eyes lingering on his.

"And yet you come—willingly—to me?"

"Willingly?" she said. "Oh, greedily!"

"Of your own suggestion?"

"Of my own suggestion."

"And on my terms?"

"Ah, no!" she cried. "On mine!"

"Well, then, for simply what you know I have?"

"For that," she said, "and nothing else."

"Great heavens!" he cried. "You're a cool hand!—You, who value yourself so well, are willing to pay so high for it."

She replied, "To the last breath of my life!"

He leaned down and kissed her wrist and then her arm, and she sat quiet in his grasp.

"What are you thinking of?" he asked, looking up.

She replied, "Of other kisses."

He sprang to his feet with a kind of snort, going to one of the windows, and Christina purled at his broad back, "Don't be angry. How can I help what I think? Have I not kept my part of the bargain? Have I not come here to meet you without another soul? To a house I never saw before? That you tell me you have hired? In a sort of wood, at night, quite alone, not even a servant—although I must say everything seems to have been well arranged and left quite handy! Would you like some supper, now? If you ordered it, I am sure it must be good. I am very obedient. All the same, I am rather hungry."

He came back to the table with the little pink line showing about his nostrils. "I do not mind your not desiring me," he said, "and perhaps, after all, I shall not mind your desiring another man. As you say, it is not a question of what you desire, but of what I do. Well, Christina, I am satisfied with your preparations for me; do you approve mine for you? You shall have servants enough, Christina, when I am sure we may not be traced by your sister's gentry! How do you like my trysting-place? You gave me very little time. If you consider it a cage, is it sufficiently gilded?"

Christina drew a long breath. "It's wonderful. A palace—wonderful! Surely I was born to walk rooms like these! And a far cry from the little boarding-house I lived in when you first met me! God knows," said Christina, in a voice that trembled, "I am glad to be here!"

"You like it then?" he cried eagerly. "It's for sale. It shall be yours to-morrow!"

"Give me some wine!" she said. "I am tired!"

He looked at her and said, yes, she was right; and she would better have something to eat.

The wine brought back her brightness; it was she who lighted the wick, heated the supper, and set the smoking chafing-dish before him. Till it came to the serving she would not let him stir and he could only lean forward on the table, looking and looking at her. During this she said little enough, except that he must be sure to praise her cooking, for she had always boasted she could be a good wife to a poor man! But once she was seated she poured out a stream of chatter which he sometimes answered and sometimes not, being intent upon but one thing, and that was to drink deeper and deeper of her presence.

Now through much of this Herrick lost sight of them, for he had come upon an interest of his own. He had discovered in one of the balusters against which he lay the jutting head of a nail. Never was an object, not in itself alluring, more dearly welcomed. For he saw that his legs were bound with only the soft cord that had once looped back the curtains between the inner and the outer balcony; there must have been two of these cords, and if his arms were but fastened with the other the edge of the nailhead might make, in the course of time, some impression upon it. He sat up and found the nail of a good height to saw back and forth upon, and if it did not convincingly appear that any effect would be made upon the cord, at least it provided him with a violent, if furtive, exercise. This was better than to lie there and let those below saw upon his heart instead.

But he must stop at last from pure exhaustion; and at that moment there was the sound of a chair pushed back. "I thank you for your hospitality," said Christina's voice. "But, now to business. I have played in too many melodramas to sign a contract without reading it. The yacht sails at sunrise?"

"Or when you will."

"And takes with her Allegra and Mrs. Pascoe and whatever of their tribe they choose?"

"Safely and secretly to Brazil! They have chosen their own crew. They must be aboard of her already."

At such words as these Herrick may well be said to have picked up his ears. He heard Ten Euyck go on:

"She is yours, Christina; and theirs if you choose to make her so!"

"You are very generous!" said Christina dryly. "But there is only one way I can be sure of the end of all this. You know what is most important to me." Herrick, leaning against the banisters had got his eye to the opening in the valance again, and he could now see Christina with her hands in her lap facing Ten Euyck. "Have you got that letter?" she said.

Ten Euyck gave his breast a smart rap so that Christina, being so near, must have heard the paper crackle there.

"Very well," said she; "so much for the District-Attorney's mail!"

He stood up, and his voice croaked with triumph as he talked. "Christina," he said, "I have brought you that letter—it's the price of my professional, my political honor; it's bought with my disgrace, with my career! But I have brought it. I'm ridiculous to you, Christina, but who got it for you? Your friends, the Inghams? your admirer, Wheeler? your poor fool of a Herrick? your cherished jail-bird, Denny?—No, I did! This letter that I have here Ann Cornish fell ill guarding, for her vengeance. You stole and lost it. Your enterprising family broke into a post-office to get it back. But the despised policeman brings it to you."

"You got it by accident, you say," commented Christina. "Don't forget that!"

"Forget! I shall never forget the triumph of catching that gang, although I renounce it at your bidding. I shall never forget your message when the letter was barely in my hands!—

"'I know now that I am come of a family of criminals. My pride is in the dust, as deep as you could wish it. If you do not help us, if it must come out that I am tied to blackmailers whom you will catch and send to prison, I shall die of it!' Christina, can I forget that?"

"No," said Christina, "I never thought you could."

"And you will remember my answer, my dear! That I had the proof, the letter in my hand, to publish or to destroy, as you should choose. You haven't forgotten that?"

"No," said Christina again. "But the destroying, that's the thing! You'll burn it?"

"Yes."

"Before my eyes?"

"Of course."

"To-night?"

"To-morrow!"

She seemed, for a moment, to take counsel with herself. "Very well."

An extraordinary limp helplessness, a kind of dejection of acquiescence, seemed to melt her with lassitude at the words. It was enough to sicken the heart of any lover, and even Ten Euyck cried out, as if to justify himself, "Ah, remember—you gave me the slip once before!" And at the memory he seemed to lose all control of himself, falling suddenly forward, clinging to her knees and hiding his face in her skirts.

She sat for a moment motionless. Then, with fastidious deliberation, as if they were bones which a dog had dropped in her lap, she plucked up his wrists in the extreme tips of her fingers, and slowly pushed him off. "Quietly!" she said. "You are one who would always do well to be quiet!"

He sat on his heels, the picture of misery, already ashamed and almost frightened at himself. And suddenly, "Christina," he whispered, while another flash branded itself across his face, "whose kisses were you thinking of?"

She did not, at first, understand; and then, remembering—"I will take a page from your book. I will tell you to-morrow."

"Was it Denny?" he snapped.

"Denny?" said she, abstractedly. "Will? God bless me, no!"

He sighed with a kind of vacancy. "You could easily tell me so!"

"Well, then," said Christina, with considerable temper, "I will tell you something else. When I came here to-night, that I might not die of my own contempt I promised myself one thing. I swore to that girl I used to be, who carried so high a head she could not breathe the same air with you and never thought to stand you miawling and whimpering here about her feet, that at least I should tell no lies of love. There shall never come one out of my mouth to you and may God hear me. So if I do not tell you the man I thought of, it is only because I can not bear to speak his name in this place!—But rest easy! I am very capricious. Things will be different to-morrow. To-morrow, if you still think it interesting, you shall know."

"Know!" he cried. And catching her arm, looked at her with a baleful face. "Yes, there's my trouble! What do I know of you at all! I met you once four years ago—well, I forget myself, I know it! But did I?—Were you even then—? Well, at the inquest, at that reception, in the station, holding to Denny, the night of your performance, and now, to-night! There's my knowledge of you! You dazzle, you befool, you drive me crazy, and you leave me empty—why should I throw my life away for that! After all, where were you when all New York was looking for you? Nearly a week! Where were you?"

"Where was I!" Christina cried. "Well, it's rather long. But does not the favorite slave always tell stories to her master? Listen to Scheherezade."

Then, for the first time, Herrick heard the story of Christina's visit to the yellow house; how she had determined that Allegra must tell the authorities, in Denny's behalf, the story of his provocation against Ingham; how then, hidden in Nancy's, she had found Allegra's hair and guessed everything. "Then it seemed that the first thing was to get Nancy away, quietly, without warning, so that there should be no danger to her. I thought that then I could manage Allegra." She had had Allegra come into town for her performance, and go straight from it to the Amsterdam, up to Christina's apartment in Christina's name; following her there she had slept on the couch, and slipped off early in the morning. Suspecting the identity of the motor, she had telephoned for it as though to meet them both, and now she went on to tell Ten Euyck of her attempt to deceive Mrs. Pascoe, as though she had come from Allegra, and of her imprisonment in the closet.

"Ah, that wretched necklace! I said to myself, 'If it comes to a fight, they may find it and take it from me.' And then I should really have been in your power! I buried it in the flower-pot, thinking to come back with reinforcements!" She told of the flight in the rain, and of the farmers who wouldn't wake up. Both men listened, absorbed, staring. And Christina said, "I was afraid to go toward Waybrook, in case those men followed me. I ran toward Benning's Point. I feared the main road, too, and I thought I could follow the short cut. It is very hilly and broken and I had never seen it before in the dark; the sheets of rain were like the heavens falling, and the wind beat out my last strength; I was mud up to my knees and I had on heavy clothes, too large for me, all dragging down with wet. Perhaps it all made me stupid; at any rate, I lost my way. Oh!" said Christina, "that was hard!" and she put her hand over her heart. "I don't know—it must have been hours—I ran and staggered and stumbled and climbed! You are to remember I had had no food all day, and little enough the day before. And by and by I fell. I got up and on again for a little, but I had hurt myself in falling, and I fell again. And this time I lay there."

Ten Euyck lifted the border of her golden dress and put it to his lips.

The moisture of self-pity swam in Christina's eyes. "Nancy!" she said. "That was worst to think of!" In her own lip she set her teeth and soon she went on—"While I was still unconscious, a man came along with a motor. Somehow, he didn't run over me; he found me. And he recognized me! He wanted the reward. He took me to his sister's; to that Riley's. They gave me all sorts of hot drinks and things; I think they saved my life. But when I tried to thank them, something very comic had happened—I had lost my voice." Christina closed her eyes.

"Well?" said Ten Euyck.

"Well, that woman said I needed sleep, so she sent her brother out of the room—but she didn't send her husband. When she found I could not speak, she pulled down the blinds of her room for fear some one should see in, and said I needn't make a fuss, trying to get away, for she knew as well as any one I was mixed up with murder and trying to clear out. She said she was not going to hold any poor girl that was in trouble, not for the few hundreds he would give her out of that reward. She was going to let me go. 'But first,' said she, 'I'll thank you to hand over that diamond necklace!'"

Both Ten Euyck and the unseen Herrick started and stared.

"She wouldn't believe me. If I didn't have it, I had hidden it since I got in the house. 'Very well, if you won't do anything for me, I think there's a gentleman who will. I think the party for me to send for is Mr. Ten Euyck.' I wasn't ready for you, then, nor did I mean to be handed over to you, like a thief done up in a bundle! But what was I to do? I was still weak and she was between me and the locked door! I'm grand at screaming," said Christina, "but I couldn't even speak! And then, out of the stones of the courtyard, heaven raised up a miracle for me!"

"It was you, then?"

"The shadow? yes. But how could I dream a friend would be going by? It was just a desperate game, a wild chance! She had been telling me what an outcry there was, how I would be recognized anywhere, and about the moving-picture, and how they played the march from Faust, now, at that film—and I thought of the reward and how there must be many looking for it. There was a piano in that room and I went to it, put my foot on the loud pedal and began to play. 'Oh,' I thought, 'will some one glance up? Will some one guess?' And then I threw the shadow on the blind! Before she could do much more than drag me away, my unsuspected friend was in the room. She didn't dare to try to keep me. He put a hat and cloak on me from her closet—oh, I'm sure he sent them back!—and snatched me off!"

"And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this friend?"

"Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her head in her hands.

This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been checked where he was.

"No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you—yes, I should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the keys and her voice breaking into song—

"I'm only a poor little singing girlThat wanders to and fro,Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl;At least they tell me so!At least—"

she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck,

"At least they tell me so!"

"Christina!" he said hoarsely.

"You like personal ditties! You shall have another!

"You dressed me up in scarlet redAnd used me very kindly—But still I thought my heart would breakFor the boy I left behind me!

That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of all!—

"We twa hae run about the braesAnd pu'd the gowans fine;But we've wandered many a weary footSin auld lang syne."

The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and fell in long, triumphing breaths, and—"Damn him!" Ten Euyck cried. "It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!"

"For auld lang syne, my dear,For auld lang syne—

Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows!

"We'll tak a cup o' kindness yetFor auld lang syne.

Ah, that stays my heart!—Ten Euyck!"

"My God!" he cried. "I won't bear it!"

He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As good as dead?

"He is dead and gone, lady,He is dead and gone,At his heels a grass-green turf;At his head, a stone!

Come, pluck up spirit!

"Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride!Hark, hark, across the sea!Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed!Dost fear to ride with me?

—'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her face but not from his.

She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace, and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered.

"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they all there? No—here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile. "There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have changed my mind."

She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.

Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,—"Explain yourself!" He shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous outrage to commonsense.

"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't pay!"

"Not pay!"

"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored, golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot! I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish ambition—well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our first encounter,youhave always typified that world."

He started back, and released her hands.

"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world, to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy to imagine that you would be under my heel.—No, I should be under yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by it!—No, I thank you!"

"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.

Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."

"Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in jail."

The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but—"Well," she said, "you the upholder of the law—you shall judge. She lived off me—that's nothing!—But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them, and made me an ignorant partner in it—that's something, you'll admit! And—Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim Ingham.—Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will—dies," cried Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message, in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"

Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands onhim—O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms buried her face in them.

The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had been touched.

"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you don't mean—Herrick!"

She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for him to read.

He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him, together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.—

"'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,He swam the Eske River—'"

Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he stay not for brake and he stop not for stone—yet ere he alights here at Netherby Gate—"

"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it, with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth—

"'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war—'

Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!—Will and Nancy; after all, they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than—me! But he is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine! He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew it—she knew it! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him too!—Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And she began to shake with weeping.

"That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do you?"

"Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped.

He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I should like those lights out!"

He went about putting out light after light, till she said,

"Leave my lamp!"

She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and seemed to illumine her within a magic circle.

"My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are? And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina—do you really think you can get away with it?"

"No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything. And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow. You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall find a way to die."

His face grayed as he looked at her.

"Do you think I am not acquainted," Christina went on, "with the story of Lucretia? I could strike a blow like hers! And oh, believe me, like her I should not die in silence!" She felt him start. "Do you suppose I should not tell why I came here? Do you by any chance suppose I should not tell what bait I had from the Inspector of Police? Ah, when we have something to lose, we stumble and make terms. But when we have no longer anything, we are the masters of terms.—Is this my last night?" Christina asked.

"By God!" he said, "you know how to defend yourself!" And his arms dropped at his side.

He was a moment silent, his mouth twitching, his eyes drinking her up. Christina had, in argument, that better sort of eloquence that calls up convincing pictures. Doubtless, he knew she might denounce his theft of the letter. Doubtless he saw her, then, clay-cold; lost to him, utterly. On the other hand, to lose her, now, was a thing outside nature and not to be endured. So that suddenly he broke out in a kind of high, hoarse whisper; "Christina, there's another way! I never meant to marry—but—Christina, shall it be that?"

"What!" she exclaimed. It was a volcanic outcry, not a question. She stretched out her two arms, with the palms of her hands lifted against him, and laughter and amazement seemed to course through her and to wave and shine out of her face, like fire in a wind.

"Christina," he said; "Christina, I will marry you!—Oh, Christina, isn't that the way! There's your ambition! There's your satisfaction! There's the world under your shoe! Christina, will you?"

"Is it possible?" she said. And again—"Is it possible! What! Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck and the girl in the moving-picture show? 'Mr. Ten Euyck' and the sister of a jail-bird! Eh, me, my poor soul, is it as bad as that?" Her laughter died and her brows clouded. "It's a far cry, Ten Euyck, since you stole my kiss on the sly! You laid the first bruise on my soul! You put the first slur and sense of shame into the shabby little girl in the stock-company who had no one to defend her but a boy as poor as herself. What did it feel like, dear sir, that check? We have come a long way since then, but have you forgotten? And does the pure patrician and the representative of high life now lay the cloak of his great name down at my feet? To walk on it, yes! But to pick it up? After all, I think it would be stopping! Ah, my good fellow, I don't jump at it!"

"I know you don't! That's why I want you! I've been jumped at all my life!" Thus Ten Euyck, holding her fast, his face burning darkly under her little blows of speech, and his pulse rising with the sense of battle. "I think I've never known a woman who wouldn't have given her eyes to marry me! I've never taken a step among them without looking out for traps! Christina, I long to do the trapping and the giving, yes, and the taking, for myself! You don't want me; well, I want you! Yes, for my wife! I see it now. You dislike me, you despise me. Well, your dislike doesn't count; believe me, you'd not despise me long! I'd rather see you bearing my name—you, with another man for me to wipe out of your heart, you, as cold as ice and as hard as nails to me,—than any of those soft, waiting women! See, we'll play a great trick on the world! We'll be married to-morrow! We'll sail for Europe. From there we'll send back word we've been married all along. People shall think that when you left me the other night I followed you; that we fooled them from the beginning, and when next they see you, you shall be on my arm! Come, Christina, will not that be a reëntry? Will not the world be vanquished, then?"

"Hush!" she said, with lifted finger. "I thought I heard some one!" She lifted the lamp from the mantelshelf and going to the window held it far out into the darkness with an anxious face. "No!" she breathed. Ten Euyck observed with joy that her manner to him had changed; it had become that of a fellow-conspirator. Up and down the terrace she sent the light, her apprehensive eyes searching the shadows and the bushes. "No!" said she again, "I was wrong."

She came back to him flushed and eager, and setting the light upon the table, he caught her hands. "Remember!" he said, "otherwise I shall stop your sister. And where will your name be then?"

Her nostrils widened, her eyes contracted, doubt succeeded to triumph in her face. "If it were not the truth!" she said.

"What do you mean?"

"If there were no such necessity! If you did not have my name in your power at all. If you have no such letter!"

"Christina!"

"It is what I have doubted from the beginning! How do I know you haven't lied to me all along? I ask you if you have that letter, and you thump your breast! I ask you to show it to me and you answer, 'To-morrow'! Traps—did you say? Did you think I was to be caught in a trap? When you were looking for a poor gull, did you cast eyes on Christina Hope? If you had that proof to show me, you wouldn't hesitate! There is no such letter—I can see it in your face!"

He took the letter from his coat and held it up.

"Oh, well," Christina said, "I see an envelope. Am I to marry for an envelope?"

He cast the envelope away, folded the letter to a certain page and held it for her to read.

She read it and a faintness seized her. She stood there, swaying, with closed eyes, and he put an arm about her for support. She leaned upon him, and he put down his mouth to hers. "Christina, look up!" he cried. "Don't be afraid! Don't tremble so! My darling, here's your first wedding-present!" And, alarmed by her half-swoon, transported by that surrender in his arms, he held the letter above the lamp and let its edge catch fire.

Christina opened her sick eyes and they dwelt dully on the paper and then with pleasure on the little flame. "Let me!" she breathed. "Yes, let me. It's my right."

He put the burning paper in her hands, smiling on her with a tender playfulness. "Take care!" he said.

"I will take care." She held up the paper, intent on the thin edges crisping in the glowing fire, and then, swift as a deer and wild as a lion's mate, she sprang away, clapped her hands hard upon the burning paper, pressed out the flame upon the bosom of her gown, and thrust the letter in her breast. "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"

Ten Euyck's face blazed white with anger. Sick with rage, driven with bewilderment and some touch of vague suspicion, all his cold strength gathered itself. He was no longer merely a harp for Christina's fingers. She stood at the far end of the room with her back against the wall, barricaded, indeed, by a little gilded table, but not at all alarmed or even concerned, and the master of the situation forced himself to say quietly, "I am tired of play, my dear. I shall not run after you. Bring that letter here!"

Christina laughed.

"You will come to me, quite obediently, and give that letter here to me."

"Oh, I think not!" Christina said. "Not to a thief! Not to a blackmailer! Nor even to a gentleman who tried, and failed, at murder.—How much did you give the man in the Tombs?"

A profound silence fell upon that house. It was as if, in that great golden room, among the mirrored gulfs of shadow, something held its breath. Night seemed to look in at the windows with a startled face. Then somewhere, a hawk cried. And still there was no movement in the room. The homely sound of crickets rose from without like the stir of a world immeasurably far away. And Christina, in the changing lusters of her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal, and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse.

"You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And could you ever imagine it was foryouI came! For your name, for your position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you protect yourself? Am I the girl to throw myself away on you for the sake of a bad sister, who has treated me with so much hate? It took all your greed, all your vanity, all your stupid, cruel pomp and dullness to be fooled like that! Did you ever really think I could stoop to such a scene as this to-night for you—or me? Oh, blind, blind, blind! How could you imagine I would leave him in your hands and never make a fight for it? Did you think I didn't remember?—that I couldn't still hear, as I heard when I was a frightened girl, the stroke of his hand across your face, and that I didn't know you had always had death for him in your heart?"

She covered her face with her hands and then she stood up tall again.

"My dear Will, my poor boy!—who treated me as if I were his little brother! Oh, the cold night trips on railway trains when I couldn't pay for a sleeper and used to sit wrapped in his coat; the morning races down the track for coffee; the scenes we used to work and work on and get so cross we almost struck each other; the time I was discharged and he lent me his few dollars till I should get work again; his first big hit and then mine; and then—Nancy, and all the sweetness of a hundred times with both my dears! Did you think I was going to sit quiet and let you turn your heel on all of that? Allow your conceit and insolence and spite to feed on his disgrace and danger! Letyousneer athim! Leavehimto be triumphed over byyou!—Will Denny by a Ten Euyck! An artist by a bourgeois Inspector of Police! An actor," cried Christina, beginning to soar, "andsuchan actor, by a mere outsider! Your side over mine!—Why did you try? Will to be shamed and hidden in the dark! And you to be bowed down to, to swell and strut and smirk and look dull and glossy and respectable, and be brushed by valets, and have prize cattle raised for you to eat, and carry gold umbrellas! He to die! And you to pillow yourself upon a hundred crimes he never dreamed of!—Tybalt in triumph and Mercutio slain!—You poor, pretentious, silly, vulnerable soul!—not while he was paying for one moment's madness, and I began to guess and hope and pray that about you there was something prisons had been gaping for, year after year, if only I could find it out! Did you really think I didn't guess what was in this letter? Do you think I didn't know you sent Nicola into that post-office to steal it? Why, it was I, with my last strength, who mailed it there. He must have found some trace of me and guessed. Nothing in heaven or earth would have brought me here, except to steal it back!"

"How did you—" he tried to say. But the machinery of his throat was stiff and could not work. He swallowed once or twice, and then, dropping his dulled eyes, he got out—"When—did you—at first—?"

"When you came so grandly to the station, a master of the trap that my poor boy was caught in, and said, 'If she would tell the jury what she told him—' Don't you remember that I answered, 'How do you know what she told him?' A strange confidant for Allegra! It wasn't accident, coincidence—for you knew the music that she made for Will's and my French song! Not five minutes later I learned what Allegra was! A queerer confidant, still, for an Inspector of Police! I said to myself, 'There is a very black spot frozen inside that block of bilious ice. If one could know, now, what it was!' Then came your necklace and your note. And I saw you were a violent, greedy creature, after all, who would go a long way to get your will; I saw you could be managed—and how. I remembered Will's saying that people like us had nothing but ourselves to fight with. Oh, it has been with myself that I have fought! I'm sorry, I'm ashamed. But I've won!—What was my second hint? Do you remember the torn card of the Italian Bryce Herrick had to kill? How it said, 1411—nothing more? When I 'phoned you to call for your necklace your number wasn't in the book. The girl, at first, gave me a wrong direction. Then she remembered that was your old number which you had just had changed. The district was the same, of course. But the old number ran, 1—4—1—1.—Ah, wait for my third—the best of all! My good Ten Euyck, you never made quite such a mistake as when you lost one symbol of respectability—as when you forgot your umbrella!"

This time he looked up with a stare.

"You left it at Allegra's, and, like all excellent housekeepers, Mrs. Pascoe put it in the closet under the stairs. I found it there. I was looking for something to break the window with. A little light came in then, and I saw the gold handle, like a staff of office, with your name. I broke the rod and have the handle still." Christina paused and smiled at him. "My sister's partner in the business of blackmail; you, whose money robbed and burned a post-office of the United States; you, whose influence attempted murder in jail, on the highroads, in the Park, rather than be found out, I make you my bow! If I cannot save Will with you, if I cannot trade you for him with the law—and oh, I think I can!—at least our side shan't fall alone! If he is to be punished, at least he will never be punished by you! But you, Mr. Ten Euyck, who exulted in his trouble, who are afraid, as he is not, who will perish at the scorn of every fool, as he has not, you, who of shame are about to die, I salute you! Your career as a criminal, your career as a shining light, they are both at an end!—And why? Because you declared war against people without money, without position, without influence, whom you despised! Because you weren't strong enough to fight Christina Hope! Remember that!"

The heart knoweth its own bitterness. For one little moment Ten Euyck stood with his eyes upon the reckless girl who was driving him to the last terrible extreme of self-defense. He had come there a happy and indulgent conqueror, and even the sweetness of a necessary revenge was black and poisoned in him. Then, in that moment, he heard what Christina, flushed with victory, did not hear at all—a little sound behind him and above his head.

His driving-coat still lay across a chair and he went slowly to it and drew the case of his revolver from its pocket; the revolver was fully loaded; he looked at the barrel a long time, as if he were thinking something out, and then he heard Christina laugh. "Take care!" she said. "I did not come without a guard."

He did not turn upon her. He still stood with his back to her, and, from under his bent brows, his glance shot up and found the parting of the valance. Now, since the lessening of the lights, Herrick, half-mad and goaded by the continual slight weakening of the cords, had grown careless of concealment. There, in the opening, his face showed. Not much, indeed; not enough to be easily recognized; all masked, too, with blood and sweat and with the gag across the mouth. But still whiter than the Italian face Ten Euyck had most expected. Then he caught a glimpse of the brown, ruddy hair, and knew. This was Nicola's and Allegra's idea of a jest.

"A guard?" he said. And he turned then upon Christina.

"Don't come near me!" the girl cried. "And if you want to live, don't shoot! My friends are all about this house! They are in waiting down the road! They have waited the whole evening long, watching for my signal. They started to close in on us when I waved my lamp. Let me cry out my name and you will hear, in answer, the horn of an automobile. It will blow three times—two short notes and one long. That means—Stand out of the way, Christina Hope; the men are ready!—Don't come near me!"

"Cry out your name!" Ten Euyck replied.

The girl lifted up her voice, and gave forth the words "Christina Hope" so that they leaped out in the still darkness and went shrilling and searching through the night, the vibrations dying in the distance, and the air giving back an echo of their call. Till, after an age-long moment, their last note died away. And nothing happened. No note from the horn of an automobile broke forth in answer; there was only a profounder stillness. Christina was left face to face with nothingness and Cuyler Ten Euyck.

"You spoke too soon!" he said. "You were always foolhardy. This time you have outdone yourself. The clever Christina was not the only person, on coming here, to take precautions. If I gave so much to the guard in the Tombs, what did I give to buy off these friends of yours? The agreeable gang your sister commands—did you think it was in your pay for to-night? It is in mine! I suspected nothing, but I took no chances. I prepared for accident. No automobile can pass that lodge. No spy can creep about these grounds. One tried, my dear. They caught him. He is lying in that little gallery gagged and bound. When his body is discovered, he will have been shot by blackmailers, whom Cuyler Ten Euyck never so much as saw. I thought you wouldn't leave me!"

Christina had gathered up her train for flight and had been manœuvering nearer and nearer to the window that gave deepest into the shelter of the dark. Only at the first word of a spy she had stood still.

"Yes," Ten Euyck went on, "I see that you guess his name. I am not a bad shot, and he can't move, poor fellow. Give me that letter!"

Christina looked along his arm, along the lifted revolver, to what was now only a dark opening in the valance. Her mouth opened, but no sound came. The life went out of her like the flame from a dying candle, and she seemed to shrink and crumple and to sway upon her feet. There was a long stillness.

"That letter, if you please!" Ten Euyck said.

"Bryce!" Christina called, quite low. "Bryce, are you there! Let me see!" she screamed out, and ran forward.

Ten Euyck held up a finger, and she stopped dead. "Do you understand that I, too, have a signal and these fellows will come at it? Do you understand what cause they have to love Herrick?—Fetch that chair!"

She brought it forward.

"No, under the balcony. Pardon my not helping you. I dare not lower my hand. Stand on the chair! Can you reach those little curtains? No? Take this candlestick—push them back! What do you see?"

Christina shuddered like a stricken birch, and gave forth a lamentable cry. The candlestick fell to the ground. She had met Herrick's eyes.

"Have I won?" said Ten Euyck.

"You are a brave girl, but you lack discretion.—Get down! Take that letter from your breast. That's right. What a pretty change in manners, my dear! Come here! Come!"

Her face looked thin and her eyes were set with fear. She came slowly on, like a person in a trance, half hanging back, half drawn with ropes. She stopped at one end of the little table, a few feet from him.

"Put out your hand and offer me that letter."

She put it out and he seized the letter and the hand in his.

"And now, my dear, understand me. In my connection with the Arm of Justice, I hold myself neither stained nor shamed. It has been an arm ofjustice; when I have struck it was—as poor Kane will tell you!—always at those who had sinned against the law, though I could not then reach them through the law. In that punishment I used an imperfect instrument, as a man who stands for decency must do, in an imperfect world. When I recognized your sister as our mysterious shadow I forced her to write this account of her disgraceful life not, as she supposed, for fear she might some day blackmail me—for there was nothing in my life to be used for blackmail—but for a net to snare you with! In that net you are caught. Never till its loss determined me to have it back at any cost did I really sin. And never legally! For when I give money to a needy woman I do not question what she does with it. If there is violence—why not? In self-defense! But if I sinned, at least I have succeeded in my sin. For here you are! While you—you have forfeited even your price. But when Denny is dead, talk over with Allegra, in her prison, the story of his death—it may divert you both! For now she, too, is lost, as well as he. And through your fault as Herrick is!"

She lifted her white face and questioned him, with the darkness of her eyes.

"Let him go! After all that he has heard? How could I? You gave your signal and now I must give mine!—It's been a hard fight, Christina! And to the victor belong the spoils!"

He dragged her slowly toward him by the clenched hand he held, his hungry smile flushed and yet cold with hate, feeding on her desperate compliance. And as he drew her past the table, Christina caught up the lamp and struck it with her whole force into his face.

There was a tremendous noise of crashing glass, and then darkness, filled with the smell of oil. Christina's slender strength had found force for such a blow that the lamp had been put out before it could explode,—and what it had been put out upon was Ten Euyck's head. He floundered back; dazed, cut, with the sense battered out of him. And at the same moment the last knot yielded to stiff fingers and Herrick staggered to his feet. He dropped over the balcony to the ground, and Christina ran toward the sound of him, in the darkness. "Oh! Oh!" she said, and clung like a child upon his breast.

But for a little crack under the door into the hall, the blackness had swallowed every shape. This was all in their favor. They stood listening, holding their breath, knowing that Ten Euyck was there before them but not able to see where; and then he fired. Herrick followed the lead of the flash and leaped upon him. Ten Euyck sank to one knee, but he had gripped Herrick as he fell; the two men struggled to their feet, and across the room and up and down they fought and clung and swayed and trampled, upsetting chairs, their feet slipping and grinding on the smooth floor; and though the shots continued to sound, they were fired downward and Christina guessed that Herrick forced Ten Euyck's hand toward the ground and was struggling for possession of the pistol. She could hear their breath pulsing and sobbing in the darkness. Suddenly their black, struggling bulk crashed down on the piano and the shots ceased. The pistol fell to the ground. Ten Euyck's voice gasped out, like rending cloth: "All six are fired! That's my signal!" Then there was an oath, a lurch, a sound of blows, the table tipped over with a smash, followed by the thud of both men falling to the floor; there was a groan, a pause, a last decisive blow, and then some one rose and came slowly toward Christina through the dark room.

In a childish terror of broken nerves, "Bryce!" Christina shrieked. Then her shrieking, outstretched fingers touched a rough, damp sleeve, and "Bryce!" she sobbed contentedly. They met with a bump, and clutched each other, laughing with joy, in this little moment before the last. Already they could hear the hurrying men; dark figures blackened on the darkness, the terraces came alive with sound, lights showed and were gone; and Herrick, holding the empty gun, sought vainly to put Christina back from him. She held to him, leaning on him, hardly breathing. "It's death, dear!" she said. "Forgive me!"

"Oh!"

She felt him bend his head, and lifting up her face, she set her mouth to his.

From the carriage sweep without there came—two short and one long—three notes from the horn of an automobile.

The door from the hall opened, letting in a flood of light. At the same time a man stepped through one of the windows. He was the first of a number whom the halls and staircases instantly absorbed. Out of Herrick's very hold Christina slipped and caught this man by the arm and hung away from him as she was wont to hang upon the arm of Hermann Deutch. "Oh, heaven and our fathers!" cried she in a faint wail. "But you were a little late!"

The man, standing tense in the shadow, was examining the room with appraising eyes. Christina, blind to something rigid in him, hurried on. "And I did so depend on a quick curtain! But all's well that ends well—I've got it! Mr. District-Attorney, your mail!"

"Who's that with you?" said the voice of Henry Kane.

As he took, from the hand that had never once resigned them, the scorched and torn sheets and buttoned them beneath his coat he glanced over his shoulder, expectantly.

"You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!"

"Please God! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he called into the hall.

Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor. They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham—that Nancy, as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our hopes leaped.—Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap.

"Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege! You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men—can we hold this house?"

Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.—"Against how many?" he replied.

It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded.

"Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come up here after us."

All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking, barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out for good. But the sheriff got this one through."

"We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys upstairs!"

As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol—which though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a dummy made all in one piece!

"So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!"

"What?"

"I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra."

"Here!"

"After us?"

"The Italian Camorra!"

"In America!"

"Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees."

"In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the window.

"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member. Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."

She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night the death of traitors."

"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!—Alieni! And capital A's! It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do with us!"

Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps, have sent Miss Hope upstairs."

"Oh, I beseech you—anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"

"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"

Silence grew up in their midst.

The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the slats give and the glass crash in!

"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front windows—Lord, who's this?"

The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and joined their council.

"Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another—if they think so!" Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the passive fingers. "There! If this blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano—they'll waste a lot of attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the river—Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!"

Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours, Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of her hardihood—he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that touched her face with a childish softness, made for cherishing—it tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place—why, of course not! This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon to come was not conceivable! Yet—hark! Was that—No, only some creak of the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in the vast yellowish gloom.—

"If you please, miss, put out that light!"

"Oh!"

"We can't afford to advertise!"

The light was gone.

In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she pressed her cold cheek to his hand.

"It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an engagement-ring!—Here they come!"

A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused, uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again, to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence.

This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry, civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a telephone!

They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry—a narrow door in the glass paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now directly in her ears—"It's Nicola!"

The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once.

"He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck."

Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient.

"Take the message."

But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in great trouble, in danger—never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pass me his word to shelter us or what will you give—what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'"

"Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news."

Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten Euyck."

Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the glassy face taking aim behind the shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across the drive.

There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet they don't attack!"

Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or is it dark with men?"

"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick.

It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the brightness of the steps the stone and then the grassy terraces fell indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form—they were the shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!" One group passed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a crouching, irregular line behind its faggot-like shields of broken boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky.

Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness, "The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf. The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois. The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina who first said, "Some one else is in this room!"

As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed.

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