Langdon Jesse maintained a bachelor apartment in London the year round. When he arrived there, about a fortnight after his turbulent scene with Mrs. Treharne and his signally unsuccessful attempt at an entente with Blythe, he found everything in order, quite as he had left it the year before. Gaskins, factotum and general overseer of the bachelor apartments, of which there were three tiers, Jesse's being the second, was a little more bald and fat, but he still rubbed his hands as a mark of subservience and cocked his head to one side in a bird-like way while engaged in conversation with his supposititious superior. He had a respectful but earnest complaint to make of one of Jesse's New York cronies, a man engaged in the somewhat tempestuous task of drinking himself to death, who had occupied Jesse's apartment for a month during the spring; for it was Jesse's habit to extend the use of his London lodging, which was desirable mainly on account of its highly privileged character, to those of his intimates who happened to be in London while he himself was in New York.

"'E was more than 'arf-seas hover hall the time, sir," Gaskins told Jesse, lamentingly, "which of course was 'is privilege, but 'e did give 'isself some 'orrid bumps when 'e come 'ome along o' three or four o' mornings. Hi'm afraid 'e would 'ave killed 'iself, sir, falling hagainst the furniture, 'ad I not been living on the premises hand come hup hand got 'im straightened hout hin bed. Hand, sir, when Hi didn't come hup, 'e would halways go to sleep in the bath-tub with 'is clothes on. A swift goer, sir, but killing 'isself; killing 'isself fast."

Jesse laughed. He was tolerant enough of the idiosyncrasies of his intimates, and this one, the "swift goer," had been of use to him in New York as a sort of organizer and major domo of revelries.

Jesse's apartment was on one of the quiet squares of Curzon Street, set amid a row of other houses given over to the accommodation of stationary and transient bachelors who found the restraints of London hotels irksome. It was beautifully appointed, even to the culinary department which Jesse himself only used on the occasions when he entertained companies of roystering Americans and their companions, who were usually more or less photographed figurantes from the musical comedies. His breakfast was brought to him from the Gaskins mÉnage in the basement, and he dined here, there and everywhere—not infrequently at the Savoy.

It had not taken Jesse long, following his arrival in London, to ascertain that Louise and Laura were at the Savoy. He had, in fact, within an hour after his arrival, caused a telephone canvass to be made of the London hotels mainly patronized by Americans during the touring season to gain this information. Now, lounging about his apartment while his Japanese man unpacked his things, he began upon the devising of a method whereby he might again meet Louise. He had been reluctantly forced to abandon the idea that by this time she might have "altered her prejudice" against him and might therefore be at least passively willing to meet him upon the plane of ordinary acquaintanceship, thus giving him an opportunity to exercise his fascinations upon her.

But he had not the least intention of abandoning his besiegement of Louise Treharne—even if the besiegement had to be turned into an ambuscade. He had come to London, leaving New York at a time when the market was setting strongly against him, solely with this purpose in his mind. He furnished himself with plenty of excuses for the deliberation with which he undertook this particular quest. It was his indurated habit to doubt the continence of all women; and he made no exception of Louise Treharne. The fact that she had scarcely been out of school a month when he had first met her did not in the least serve to give her immunity from such a doubt in Jesse's mind. His single guide in such appraisals of women was his own experience with them, and his experience, he told himself, embodied plenty of parallels to the case of Louise Treharne. Why should she be immune from a furtiveness, and the indulgences thereof, which he had so often studied at first hand? Why should she be less clever at dissimulation than many others he had known?

He had not the least doubt that he was right in this view. He sought to make himself believe that otherwise he would be entirely willing to permit Louise to go her way. But, being right, then it was intolerable that she should have flouted him—him!—as she had. It was a girlish, immature prejudice. He had not had sufficient opportunity to gain her better will. Her treatment of him had sorely touched his vanity as a moulder of women to his purposes. The circumstances of his meeting with her had deprived him of a fair chance. She was young, beautiful, and, he felt sure, superbly secretive. He had not the least intention of supinely yielding to her foolish belief—it could not be other than that—that she disliked him.

But how to proceed?

No problem, having to do with what he would have called his diversions, had ever before so daunted him. Laura, to begin with, was a stumbling block in his path. Laura, with whom he had a perfunctory acquaintanceship extending over several years, had pointedly cut him, not once, but frequently, since the newspapers had flared with accounts of the one disreputable affair concerning him which had leaked out. He knew very well that there was not the least possible chance for him to regain even a nodding plane with Laura Stedham. And she was the barrier between himself and Louise Treharne. They were rarely, he felt sure, out of each other's company. If Laura were out of the way, and he could reach Louise alone, there would, he felt, be a chance. It was unimaginable that Louise would, in such a case, be unresponsive to the allurements of his wealth, his power proceeding from wealth, his personality—Jesse felt so absolutely certain of this that he smiled when a vague doubt of it passed through his mind.

He had won many aloof women by bestowing upon them magnificent gifts. But he knew perfectly well that this method would not do with Louise Treharne. Whatever else she might be, there was, he felt, not a particle of greed in her. There had even been times when Jesse had not scrupled to effect his designs by putting forth the pretence that his devotions tended in but one direction—the altar. How to employ even this final method to engage the attention of a woman whose eyes, he very well knew, would flame with scorn of him even if she found herself accidentally in his presence?

For several hours, while Mutsu, his Japanese valet, went forward with the unpacking, Jesse strode up and down his apartment, going over this problem as he would have calculated the chances and mischances of a market campaign.

It was inevitable that Jesse, at the end of his study of the problem, should have reached but one conclusion: it must be an ambuscade.

Having reached this conclusion, he measured the risk and sought to forecast the aftermath. Everything was in his favor. In the situation which he meditated bringing about, he knew that, in case anything went wrong, the man's word would be worth that of a thousand women, no matter how exalted their reputations. And more than likely, he calmly figured, there would be no aftermath at all. Entrapped, and perceiving no possibility of escape Louise would acknowledge her finely-acted furtiveness to him, and, like all women who used furtiveness as a screen, would make the best of the situation—which was all that Jesse desired.

The salient feature of the plan which rapidly took form in his mind consisted in discovering when Louise and Laura should be out of each other's company, even for a short time. Jesse, not in the least balking at the idea of setting a deliberate trap because he knew that he would hold the advantage no matter what the outcome, applied himself to the solution of this by no means minor difficulty. The sight of the silent, busy Mutsu, industriously stowing his master's gear in dressers and closets, furnished Jesse with a suggestion.

He would give his Japanese man a vigil at the Savoy. The vigil might be a tedious as it was sure to be a delicate one, but Mutsu was both patient and discreet. He was a studious but alert man-boy of indeterminate age, as is characteristic of Japanese males under fifty, who had been employed as a club attendant in New York for several years and thus had added to his natural gift for discretion. He had been with Jesse for more than a year, always doing more than was ever asked of him, but studiously refraining from indicating whether he entertained any personal liking for his employer—which is another trait of a certain type of Japanese in their relationships with Occidentals.

Jesse spent a concentrated half hour in minutely instructing Mutsu as to what he desired of him. The valet was to go to the Savoy on the morrow, and, by liberally tipping the doorman at the ladies' entrance, or the carriage-opener, or whomsoever among the hotel's menials he found the most pliable or knowing, have Mrs. Laura Stedham and Miss Louise Treharne, American ladies who were guests of the hotel, pointed out to him when they should make their appearance, as they no doubt would in the course of the day, either for driving or walking. Miss Treharne would be the younger of the two. After having familiarized himself with the personal exteriors of these ladies, Mutsu was to keep vigil, on whatever pretext he might invent, in or around the hotel, until such a time as he should see the older of the two American ladies leaving the hotel alone. Whenever that should happen, the valet was instantly to telephone to Jesse at the Curzon Street apartment. The watch on the movements of the two ladies was not to terminate until Mrs. Stedham should leave the hotel unaccompanied by Miss Treharne, no matter how many days of waiting should be required before such a thing occurred.

Mutsu nodded and exhibited his dental smile when Jesse had finished his instructions. He understood the instructions perfectly, without, of course, in the least guessing at the purpose back of them.

Jesse made no mistake in appraising his Japanese man's acuteness at such work. Within less than two hours after ingratiating himself, by the use of unostentatiously distributed backsheesh, with certain of the Savoy's flunkeys, Matsu had had Laura and Louise pointed out to him as they left the hotel and entered a taxicab. He fixed their faces on his mental recording tablets, and called up Jesse on the telephone and told him of his progress.

Thenceforward, for several days, the wiry little Japanese valet hovered about the ladies' entrance of the Savoy, forestalling suspicion as to the purpose of his loitering by the bestowal of liberal pourboires upon such of the flunkeys as were in a position to notice the constancy of his vigil.

Jesse kept to his Curzon Street apartment during the day, ever on the alert for a telephone message from his valet. He chafed under the necessity—as he deemed it—which kept him indoors throughout the daylight hours and only permitted of his prowling about London at night. But he possessed a sort of Luciferian determination in the pursuit of such a purpose as that upon which he was now engaged; to the successful accomplishment of which he would have passed his days in a cellar if that had been one of the requirements of the game.

Laura had many friends, English and American, in London whom she received and called upon informally. She cared nothing for the "functionizing" of the Anglo-American social season in London, but she keenly enjoyed the unceremonious gayeties of little groups of friends. She laughingly declared that she had "trained" the people she liked to "drop in" upon her in London in the American manner of neighborliness; and she enjoyed "showing off," as she expressed it, "the beautiful Miss Treharne, from the States," as some of the chatty London weeklies had alluded to Louise. She liked to junket about, too, with Louise; and there was no lack of agreeable men keen to take them on day-long motor tours through the country, attach them for merry afternoons to houseboat parties, and so on. For her part, Louise enjoyed the contrast afforded by the shy diffidence of the young Englishmen whom she met to the exuberant breeziness of Laura's American men friends in London.

One afternoon—it was ten days after Jesse's arrival in London—Laura suggested to Louise, at luncheon, that, as they had a "clean slate" for the remainder of the daylight hours for the first time in a long while, a tour among the shops, including a visit to the American department store just then established in London, might fill in a part of the time agreeably.

"But I am not insisting upon your going with me, dear," said Laura. "I know your lack of keenness for shopping in London, and I don't blame you, considering how the tradespeople here try to positively make one buy things one doesn't want. So you can very easily escape on the plea that you have letters to write, or that you are tired and want to rest up for the theatre tonight, and I shan't be in the least miffed."

"I'll make it the letter-writing plea, then, Laura," said Louise, "and cling to the truth in spite of the temptation you offer me to fib. I really have a lot of letters to write."

Laura went away in a taxicab directly after luncheon, saying that she would not be gone more than three hours, and Louise, at the desk in the sitting room of their suite, began a letter to her father, from whom, forwarded by John Blythe, she had lately received a long and affectionate letter, expressing his anxiety to see her and the hope that he might so arrange his business affairs as to permit of his visiting New York late in the Autumn.

About half an hour after she had begun writing the telephone bell rang.

"His this Miss Tre'arne?" Louise heard a man's voice, "but Mrs. Stedham says that you are that of an upper servant," in the telephone.

"Yes, I am Miss Treharne—what is it?" she replied.

"Begging pardon, Miss Tre'arne," went on the man's voice, "but Mrs. Stedham says that you are not to be halarmed. Mrs. Stedham, Miss, was taken slightly ill in a taxicab—nothing serious, Miss, she hasks me to hassure you—and she is now with Mrs. 'Ammond, at Number Naught-Fourteen Curzon Street. Mrs. Stedham, Miss, hinsists that you be not halarmed, and wishes you to come to 'er at Mrs. 'Ammond's at once. This is Mrs. 'Ammond's butler that is speaking."

"Tell Mrs. Stedham, please, that I shall come at once," said Louise, instantly aroused by the thought that something serious might have happened to Laura. "What is the number and street again, please? And you are sure Mrs. Stedham has had no accident or is not seriously ill?"

"It is Naught-Fourteen Curzon Street, Miss Tre'arne," came the reply, "hand Mrs. Stedham 'erself hasks that you be hassured that she is only slightly hindisposed."

"I shall be there immediately, please tell her," said Louise, making a pencilled note of the address.

Very uneasy, Louise put on her hat and long pongee coat with fluttering fingers. She felt that something serious must have happened to deflect Laura from a shopping tour to the home of a woman friend. She had not heard Laura allude to any woman friend in London named Mrs. Hammond, but that consideration did not linger more than an instant in her mind, for Laura no doubt had many London friends of whom she had not chanced to speak.

Within less than five minutes after receiving the telephoned summons, Louise was on her way in a taxicab to the address in Curzon Street. She was pale and in a tremor of uneasiness when the taxicab pulled up at the curb of a neat three-story house near the end of a row of similar houses.

So perturbed was she by the thought that she had not been told the entire truth as to what had happened to Laura that she scarcely noticed the bald, bland Gaskins when he opened the door for her and said "Miss Tre'arne?"

"Yes, yes," hastily replied Louise. "Where is Mrs. Stedham?"

"If you please, Miss, Hi shall conduct you," said Gaskins, inured by years of experience to the sort of deception he was practising; and he softly padded up the thickly-carpeted stairs in advance of her. Closely followed by Louise, who paid hardly any attention at all to the surroundings in her trepidation as to how she might find Laura, Gaskins quietly opened the front side door of the second floor apartment and held it open for her. Louise stepped into the room, and Gaskins, not entering himself, closed the door after her. She did not of course notice the click which denoted that the closed door was fitted with a spring lock. Afterwards Louise remembered having thought it odd that Gaskins did not follow her into the room to announce her, instead of so suddenly effacing himself.

Louise quickly saw that there was nobody in the charmingly arranged room—partly study, partly living room—in which she found herself. Also she noticed that it was distinctively a man's room. Wondering, but not yet affected by any fear, she made a few steps toward the portieres at the rear of the room.

She was about to reach out a hand to draw the portieres side, when they parted; and Langdon Jesse confronted her. He was trig in a big, overweight way in his lounging suit of grey; but the pallor of excitement had overspread his naturally waxy face, and his attempt at the debonair manner was proclaimed to be a mere assumption by the trembling of his hands and the huskiness of his voice when he spoke.

Louise had never swooned in her life. Now, however, at this apparition of the one human being she had ever learned to loathe, she pressed one hand to her forehead and another to her heart and swayed slightly. She feared that she would fall; but the thought rocketed through her mind that if she yielded to the almost overpowering physical weakness of the moment she would be at his mercy. By an effort of will which she afterwards remembered with wonderment, she steadied herself as if by the process of actually forcing her blood to flow evenly. She permitted her hands to fall to her sides and regarded Jesse with an appearance of calmness. In that clash of eyes, Jesse, after a very few seconds of it, turned his head away on pretence of motioning Louise to a chair. The impalement of her gaze was beyond his endurance.

Louise paid no attention to his arm-waved invitation to be seated, but stood in the spot where she had stopped when the first sight of him had almost sent her reeling. She regarded him steadily, almost incredulously; an expression of incredulity that such a thing could be.

"It is unpardonable, of course, Miss Treharne," said Jesse, with a clearing of the throat in an attempt to sweep away his huskiness. "But my madness to see you, the hopelessness of trying to see you, alone, in any other way—" He brought his sentence to a finish with a gesture meant to emphasize the excusableness of his position.

"Therefore you have sought to entrap me?" said Louise, with no trace of scorn in her tone; her contempt for him was quite beyond such a manifestation of loathing; she asked the question as if really astonished to discover that a man would do such a thing.

"What other method could I employ save a sort of strategy?" asked Jesse, evading her gaze. "Knowing that I was under the ban of your unreasonable dislike, that you would refuse to receive me, and wretched, despairing, under the constant castigation of your prejudice—what else could I do? What else could any man do who found himself in a state of desperation from his love for a woman?"

"Say anything but that, I beg of you," replied Louise, experiencing a surge of disgust at the man's effrontery in professing love in such a situation. "I have no reason to expect anything savoring of manliness from you, of course; but you might at least spare yourself the humiliation—if you can be humiliated—of seeming ridiculous."

"I expected harsh words from you, which, of course, is tantamount to confessing that I deserve them," said Jesse. "But I think we shall have a better understanding. Won't you be seated?"

"I would have credited you for knowing better than to ask me that," replied Louise. She stepped to the door by which she had entered, tried the knob, and of course found that the door was locked. Jesse, watching her, gradually resumed his attempt at the debonair manner. All of the odds were in his favor in this adventure. He could not see where he stood a chance to lose. Therefore, according to the smooth argument of cowardice, there was no reason, he considered, why he should continue his air of deference.

"You did not suppose that, having been to somewhat adroit pains to get you here, I would make it so easy for you to walk out without, at least, a little interchange of ideas?" he asked her, with coolly lifting brows, when she turned from the door.

She noticed his change of tone, and was conscious that she preferred it to his manner of fawning self-exculpation.

"Make your mind easy as to that. I have told you that I expect nothing whatever of you that befits a man," she replied with a coldness of tone from which he inwardly recoiled far more than if she had poured out upon him an emotional torrent of rebuke.

For a moment Jesse, studying her, was visited by the suggestion that perhaps, after all, Louise Treharne was wearing no mask; that she was really that anomaly—as he would have viewed such a one—a woman who was what she professed to be. But he quickly dismissed this prompting as something out of the question. She was merely a proficient in the art of acting, and she was employing her mimetic talent to the utmost upon him—thus he argued it out with himself. Moreover, he decided to give expression to his belief, as being calculated sooner to bring her to the realization that he had her measured.

"Listen, Louise," he said to her, thus calling her without even attempting to make his tone apologetic; he leaned his elbows on the back of a leather chair and forced himself to look directly at her as he spoke: "It is idle for you to seek to delude me. It might do if I were not nearly twice your age and had not had about five thousand times your experience. As the matter stands, it is simply absurd. At least give me credit for having cut my wisdom teeth as to women. You portray the part you assume with me very well. I'll have to say that for you. But, seeing that I have penetrated to the heart of the comedy, why protract the play?"

Louise disdained to attempt to have him believe that she did not understand him. But she was so riven by the shamefulness of his imputation that she could not have found words to reply to him if she had wanted to.

"Why not give me a chance to make good with you, Louise?" went on Jesse in a tone of arguing familiarity, coming from behind the leather chair and advancing toward her. He accepted her silence for wavering, or at least a willingness to listen to the sort of a presentation he had started. "You know that I am devilishly fond of you, else I would not have gone to all this trouble to get you here. Of course you may call it a trap and all that sort of penny-dreadful rot; but what other way had I to see you? You've scarcely been out of my mind since first I met you at Judd's—I should say, at your mother's house. I've been stark raving about you—am yet; and that's the truth. Why can't we be bully good friends? Your little pretenses are all very engaging and that sort of thing, and do you credit, of course, but you see I have penetrated them. Well, then, why can't we hit it off? You don't know how good I'll be to you if you look at the thing in the sensible way. The first time I saw you I heard them hail you as Empress Louise. Well, I'll see to it that you have the adornment and the investiture of an Empress. Well, is it a bargain, Louise? Will you shake hands on it?"

He was very close to where she stood by this time, having continued to advance toward her as he spoke. A sudden flush had appeared on his features, and his enunciation was choppy, muffled, indistinct from the huskiness of passion.

"Don't come any closer to me than you are," she said to him when, within an arm's length of her, he stopped and held out his hand to bind the pact his words had attempted to frame. She spoke quietly, stood her ground, looked straight at him, and placed her hands behind her back. "And allow me to say this: I feel sure no coward of your kind ever yet escaped some sort of retribution. You will repent what you have said to me. But you will repent far more if you put your hands upon me. Will you open this door and let me go?"

She looked her innocence, her perfect purity, as she stood before him. But Jesse was blind to what even the most ordinary, uncultivated man might have seen at a glance. His prominent, protrusive eyes had become bloodshot, and, instead of breathing, he was almost gasping.

"So you're going to keep on your white domino of pretense, eh?" he sneered. "Open the door? Do you think I'm going to let you treat me as if I were some credulous cub just turned loose from school? Open the door? Don't, for Heaven's name, take me for an imbecile!"

Suddenly he reached forward and twined his arms about her waist and crushed her to him, making for her lips. She gave no outcry, but, raising her right forearm, pressed it under his chin, thus holding his head back and keeping his face from hers. But he did not relax his powerful embrace. Louise strove with all of her unusual woman's strength to break his hold upon her, but his hands were clasped back of her, and her exertions only caused the two of them to sway and change ground; and his embrace remained that of a python.

"You might as well drop this damned ground-and-lofty business and behave yourself like a sensible girl, you know," panted Jesse, speaking in a choked tone because her forearm remained wedged under his chin. "You're game, and all that sort of thing, and you're all kinds of a good actress, too; but, by God, you're not quite clever enough to pull the wool over my eyes! You're Antoinette Treharne's daughter, and you're some other things besides that I don't exactly know the details of but have a pretty good guess at; and you're going to rest quiet in these arms today, if you never do again!"

They struggled back and forth, Louise, quite conscious that she stood in the greatest peril she was ever likely to know, holding her own with a strength which Jesse, even in the madness of the moment, told himself was almost preternatural in a young, slender woman.

"You are simply wasting your strength, you know," Jesse went on, putting forth all of the power of his arms and holding her so close to him that for a moment she could not move. "I have no taste for this sort of schoolboy and schoolgirl tugging and hauling. But you force me to it. You haven't a chance on earth of getting out of here, even if I release you—which I shall, as soon as I have taken a little harmless toll of your lips. Now, are you going to be sensible and quit this idiotic business?"

Louise did not answer him. She had said no word, made no plea, since he had seized upon her. She knew that words would be useless, and she could not have framed a beseeching phrase to address to him had she tried. She was taking her chance, doing all she could to make the chance better. But she could not and would not implore him to release her. She thought of screaming; but, remembering how the man who had conducted her upstairs had let her into the room and then obliterated himself, she reasoned it out, even in the intensity of the struggle, that this man no doubt was a flunky accomplice who would pay no attention to her screaming. Nevertheless she did decide that, as a last resort, she would scream, taking the chance that whomsoever happened to be on the floor beneath or the one above might come to her assistance.

She had relaxed a little, for rest, as he spoke to her, and, catching her off her guard, Jesse suddenly put forth all of his power and swung her, slipping and almost falling as he did so, partly through the portieres from which he had emerged when she came in.

When the portieres thus were thrust apart, Louise saw, standing in the middle of the room which they screened off, a surprised-looking, somewhat scowling little Japanese. Jesse caught sight of Mutsu at the same instant that Louise did.

"What the devil are you doing here?" Jesse demanded of the valet. "Get out and stay out till this evening, do you hear?"

Mutsu first lowered his head, then shook it with a most decided negative. His lips were pulled back from his teeth; mutiny shone all over him.

"What you do?" he demanded of Jesse, falling into a pidgin vernacular which he rarely used except when excited. "She no like to be crushed in embrace? She is of an innocence. She is of an honorable. I saw that at Savoy Hotel when first I see her. Why you no let go?"

"Get out of here, I say, you damned chattering monkey!" Jesse raged at him, relaxing his hold upon Louise, and leaping at the little Japanese.

Mutsu, retreating not an inch, met the charge of his employer with lowered head, and when Jesse thrust out a hand to grab him the Japanese, revealing a perfect adeptness at jiu-jitsu which Jesse never had known he possessed, seized the thrust-out hand between both of his own sinewy ones; and in an instant Jesse's face was drawn with pain. Then the Japanese made a sudden dart behind Jesse, pulling back the hand to which he still clung and the arm to which it was attached in such a way that the big, bulky man could not move without breaking the arm; he felt the tendons stretching to the breaking point as it was.

"Now you go, Miss innocent honorable lady," said Mutsu, without visible excitement, to Louise. "Go through next back room and out door there. I see you at Savoy tonight after I get fired-dismissed from valet position here."

Jesse, his face red with the torture of the accomplished jiu-jitsuing he was receiving, stormed at and cursed the Japanese in fo'c'sle terms as he saw Louise pass toward the rear door the Japanese had indicated. She nodded affirmatively to Mutsu when he told her that he would be at the Savoy that evening to see that she had arrived there safely; then she passed through the rear door leading into the hall, went down the thickly-padded stairs without awakening the bald and bland Gaskins, who dozed in a hall chair; and had the luck to hail a taxicab almost in front of the house.

Laura was at the hotel, and in a panic of worriment about Louise, when the girl got back. Louise told Laura what had happened in a few words, then fainted, falling back heavily upon a couch, for the first time in her life—after the danger was all over, with the usual feminine whimsiness.

That night the following cable message to John Blythe was flashed under the sea:

"Come immediately. You are needed here. Laura."