At one o'clock David, still aflame with bitterness, was entering his room when a door across the hall opened and Kate Morgan looked out. "Come into my house!" she snapped in a whisper.

David could not see her face, but her voice told him she was angry. He followed her. Actresses' photographs on the walls, a rug of glaring design, cheap red-and-green upholstered furniture that overcrowded the little room—such was Kate Morgan's parlour. She closed the door, then turned, her eyes blazing, and swore at him.

"A nice time to be getting home! I've been waiting two hours for you!"

For a moment he looked at her uncomprehendingly. "Oh, you're thinking of that robbery. You needn't have waited. I told you I'd have nothing to do with it."

"Drop that bluffing! You know you're in it!"

He started toward the door.

"Where you going?" she demanded.

"To bed."

She seized his arm, stepped between him and the door and stared wrathfully up at him. She now saw how pale and drawn his face was. Her wrath slowly left her. "You're tired—blue," she said, abruptly, but softly.

He nodded. "So I'm going to bed."

"Let's chat a minute first," she said, and drew him to the largest of the chairs, and pushed him down into it. "And we'll have something to eat, just you and me. I've made dad go to bed. It's all ready. I'll bring it in here."

She moved a little table before him and went out. Could David have seen the look she held upon him through the door, he would have been puzzled, perhaps startled. After she had made three trips into the rear of the flat there were upon the table a plate of sandwiches, a dish of olives, a pie, and two cups of coffee, all served with a neatness that, after the Bowery restaurants, was astonishing to David.

"Now, we'll begin," she said, and sat down on the opposite side of the little table. The food had a wonderful taste to David, and the coffee—it was real coffee—warmed his chilled body. For several minutes they both ate in silence, then Kate pushed back her chair, lighted a cigarette, and sat regarding him with eyes that grew very soft.

When he had finished she leaned suddenly forward and laid a hand on one of his.

"I don't like it for you to look this way, David," she said.

He started at the touch and at the "David." She saw the start and drew her hand away. "Why shouldn't I call you David? We're good pals, ain't we? I'm tired of this miss and mister business. Call me Kate."

He was still too surprised to make an immediate answer, and she went on softly, "You look very bad!"

The remark brought flooding back to him all his misery and hopelessness, all his rebellion, and he forgot his wonder at her overture. "Why shouldn't I?" he asked bitterly.

She nodded. "I understand," she said. "The world's got no use for a man that's been a crook. He's got no chance. I've seen a lot of boys come back, and swear they'd never touch another job. They tried—some of 'em hard, but none as hard as you. But nobody wanted 'em. What way was open? Only one—to go back to cracking cribs. They all went back." She paused, then added: "Now I want to ask you one square question: what's the use trying?"

David was remembering his four months' futile struggle when he involuntarily echoed, "What's the use!"

"Yes, what?" she continued quickly. "The world may not owe you a living, but it owes you the right to live. It owes you that much. If it won't let you live by working, why, you've got to live by stealing. There's no other way. You've tried the first—"

She went on, but David heard no more. His bitterness, his resentment, were making a fiercer plea. Yes, he had tried! Could any man try harder? And what had he gained? Rebuff—insult—uttermost poverty. There was no use in trying further—none whatever. There was left only the second way—the one road that is always open, that always welcomes the repentant thief whom the world refuses.

Why should he not enter this only road? He had no single friend who would be pained. He had no faintest hope of a future. All that could be lost was lost. The thief's trade promised him the necessities of life. He had offered to pay the world in work for these necessities, but the world had refused his payment. What could he do, then, but take them?—Besides, would it not be just treatment of the world—of the world that had destroyed him, of the world that cared more for dollars than for souls—if some of its all-precious wealth were taken from it?

He looked up; his face was tight-set, vindictive; his eyes glittered.

Kate's gaze was fixed upon him, waiting. "It's time we were starting," she said. "It's almost two."

He breathed deeply, almost convulsively.

"Come on," he said.

She reached across and seized his hand. "I knew you'd come in!" she cried triumphantly. "We'll turn a lot of tricks together, you and me!"

He gripped her hand so hard that she gave a little gasp, but he did not answer. For a minute or more they looked silently into each other's face.

"Come, we must go," she said.... "You have your diagram of the house?"

"No. I tore it up."

She drew some sheets from the front of her flannel waist. "Here's another, then. You may need it."

From beneath the red-and-green sofa she took a suit-case, which she threw open. In it were a full set of burglar's tools. "We really don't need 'em, for I've got keys to almost everything. But we'll take 'em along and twist the locks a bit, so they'll never suspect the job may have been done by someone who'd been in the inside—that is, by me. We'll bring the swag back in the suit-case."

She looked at David, as at a superior artist, for commendation of her plan; but he silently regarded the strange instruments in the bag. She slipped on a pair of rubbers, fastened on a little hat, and had David help her into a short jacket which had large pockets in the lining. David drew on his overcoat, picked up the suit-case, and together they crept down the black stairways and out into the street. She chattered softly all the while, as though fearing David, if left to his own thoughts, might withdraw from the adventure.

Shortly before three o'clock Kate paused, in one of the Seventies near Fifth Avenue, before a flight of broad steps leading up to a broad stoop and a broad entrance. "Here we are," she whispered.

They searched the street in both directions with quick glances. Not a soul was in sight. Then they slipped to the shadowed servants' entrance beneath the stoop, and in less than a minute Kate had unlocked a door of iron grating and a second door of wood, and they were standing in a dark hallway. She opened the grip, handed David a lantern, took one for herself, tied a handkerchief over his face so that all below the eyes was hidden, and masked herself likewise. Then with a jimmy and a wrench she hurried away.

Two minutes later she reappeared. She was inspired with the desire to impress David with her skill as a thief, as another woman might be inspired to attract male attention by the display of her beauty. "I just opened a back window and broke the latch," she whispered. "We'll lock these doors when we go out, and they'll think we got in through the window. Now, come on. But hadn't you better take off your shoes? They're pretty heavy."

David sat down upon a chair, and she turned her lantern's bar of light upon his feet, so that he could better manage the laces. When the shoes came off, there were his heels and toes gleaming whitely. In the confusion of strange sensations that had begun to flow in upon him, he had forgotten that his stockings were only tops. He quickly shifted his feet out of the embarrassing rays.

"That's all right," said Kate. "There'll be plenty of new ones to-morrow."

They went up a narrow stairway, then a broad one, stealthily following the guidance of the lantern's white finger, pausing breathless at every three or four steps to reach forth with their ears for any possible stir of life—Kate tense and alert with excitement, David giddied by a choking, throbbing, unshaped emotion. After a dozen of these pauses, when to David the rubadub of his heart seemed to resound through the house, Kate led him across deep rugs and through a broad doorway hung with tapestries.

"The drawing-room," she whispered, and slowly sweeping it with her lantern she revealed to him its gorgeous fittings. Then her lantern sought out a curio cabinet, of glass sides and gilded frame, standing in a corner. "That's what we want in here," she said. At her order David set down the suit-case he had carried, and they tiptoed to the cabinet over rugs worth hundreds of dollars a step.

"You get the good things in there, I'll go upstairs after the old lady's sparklers, and then we'll both go down and get the silver," she whispered, as she unlocked the cabinet with one of her keys. "I'll meet you here in a little while."

A sudden fear of being alone leaped up in David. He clutched Kate's arm and threw the lantern's light into her face. Of the face he saw only a narrow slit between her handkerchief and hat-brim, amid which her eyes gleamed like black diamonds.

"What's the matter?" she asked. "You're trembling."

"It must be—my nerves are gone," he whispered, with an effort.

"Oh, you'll be all right when you've been fed up and done another job or two."

He watched her little figure glide out of the room behind its headlight, then he turned to the contemplation of the miniature portraits in gem-set frames, the old hand-painted fans, the heavy old-fashioned lockets and earrings and bracelets, that lay upon the glass shelves of the cabinet.

He had no distinct thought toward the articles—there was no thought, not even a vague one, in his mind. His throat and lips were dry, his eyes were wide and fixed. His dizzy, unpowering emotion had so increased that he would not have been surprised had he slipped to the floor and spread out like a boneless sea creature. He was mental and emotional incoherence.

The intention to steal had brought him here. That intention was over an hour old, but since it had been neither fulfilled nor countermanded, it was stored energy; and presently it began to move his will-less members, as the stored energy of a coiled spring sets an automaton at its appointed task. He took from the floor the plunder-bag Kate had given him, and holding the lantern and the edge of the bag's mouth in his left hand, he swung open the plate-glass door of the cabinet. His eyes selected a golden bracelet, and his hand moved slowly forward and took it up.

Then suddenly his fingers unclosed, the bracelet clicked back upon the glass shelf, and his hand withdrew from the cabinet. The coiled spring of his intention had snapped. The touch of what was another man's had readjusted his confused senses. His blurred feelings became definite, his dumb brain articulate. He saw what he was doing, saw it clearly, as a bare act, unjustified by the arguments his bitterness had urged upon him an hour before—saw that he was committing a theft!

A chill swept through him and he sat stiffly upright in his chair and stared at the bracelet he had dropped. In the mood he had been in an hour or two hours before David would not have drawn back from theft, any more than any other normal starving man, could it have been committed quickly, upon impulse. But the hour that had passed, the deliberation which was surrounding the theft, had given opportunity to his moral being to overthrow the impulse and assert itself.

He rose, forgetting even to take the cabinet key. He would leave the house at once.

But as he passed out of the drawing-room it came to him that he could not go away without telling Kate of his purpose. Before him he saw a flight of stairs; she was somewhere above. He stealthily mounted, passed through a doorway and found himself in a library. He stood a moment with strained ears, but got no sound of her. He must go through the floor, and perhaps through the floor above; but before proceeding further he must get the lay of the house.

He moved noiselessly toward the library table, drawing out the plan Kate had given him. He set the lantern on the table beside a telephone, spread out the sheets and was sitting down when cautious footfalls sounded without. The next instant a blade of light stabbed the room's darkness.

"Kate?" he whispered.

"Yes."

They came toward each other and each threw his light into the other's masked face.

"I've got the old lady's twinklers," she said. "Where's your swag?"

"I didn't take it," he whispered. "I've changed my mind. I'm leaving."

"What!"

"I'm not going to take anything. I'm going away. I came to tell you that."

She drew a step nearer and for a space her black eyes gazed up into his in amazement. The deep night silence of the great house flooded over them.

"You mean it?" she demanded.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I cannot. It was a mistake, my coming."

Her eyes suddenly gleamed like knife points, she trembled with passion, and she plunged her whispered words in up to the hilt.

"So that's the kind of nerve you've got! Oh, my God!... What a damned coward you are!... Well, get out! I don't want you!"

She brushed him wrathfully by, and tensely erect, her free hand clenched, walked out of the room behind the shaft of light.

He stood motionless where she had left him, alone amid the great hush. Her words had pierced to the seat of life. He quivered with the pain—deserved pain, he realised, for it was not a noble part to leave a comrade at such a time. But he had made a mistake in coming, and the only way to correct it was to go. He wished she would go with him, but he knew the result of asking her. She would stab him again, and walk away in contempt.

He sighed, set his lantern on the table, and folded and pocketed the plans of the house. As he laid hold of his lantern to start away he saw on the table, in the lantern's ribbon of light, three or four letters that had evidently been written during the evening and left to be mailed in the morning. He started, sank to a chair, and gazed fixedly at one of the envelopes. The name on it was "Miss Helen Chambers."

Amid all the sensations that swirled within him, his mind instantly made one deduction: Kate Morgan had, after all, secured a place through Helen Chambers, and they were now in the home of one of her friends.

For a minute or more he sat staring at the envelope. It was almost as if Helen herself had surprised him in his guilty presence here. Then, across the darkness of the room, there came the faintest of sounds.

He thought it was Kate. "Is that you?" he whispered.

There was no answer; only dead quiet. In sudden fear he sprang up and directed the lantern's pointer of light toward whence the sound had come. The white spot fell upon the skirt of a dressing-gown. He jerked the pointer upward. The luminous circle enframed the square-jawed, clean-shaven face of a man—of the man he had seen with Helen Chambers—of Mr. Allen.

Instantly the room was filled with a blinding glare, and David saw Mr. Allen standing in the doorway, his left hand still on the electric-light key, his right holding out a revolver.

"Yes, it's I," said Mr. Allen in a quiet, grim voice. "Suppose you remove your mask and give me the equal pleasure of seeing whom I'm meeting."

There was no disobeying, with a revolver's muzzle staring coldly at him. David drew the handkerchief down and let it fall about his neck.

Mr. Allen gazed a moment at David's face, thin, haggard, yet rare in its fineness. "H'm. A new variety." His gaze shifted till its edge took in the telephone on the table, and there it rested reflectively. Then he remarked, as though completing his thought aloud, "I guess it will be safer for you to do the telephoning. Will you please call up Central and ask her to give you Police Headquarters?"

Wild, contrary impulses tugged at David, but man's primal instinct, self-preservation, controlled him the first moment.

"I have been near starvation," he said, forcing his words to calmness. "I came here to steal—yes; but when I tried to steal, I could not. I—I did not steal!"

His plea snapped off harshly. The world had driven him here, and with a rush he realised the world would not forgive him for being here. Bitterness swept into him in a great wave, and the recklessness that feels that all is lost. Besides, he could not ask mercy of Helen Chambers's lover.

Mr. Allen gave an ironic laugh. "I've been hearing that sort of story for fifteen years. There never was a guilty man.—Call up Central."

The natural animal hatred of a rival flared up. David looked Mr. Allen defiantly in the face. "If you want Central, call her yourself!" he said slowly.

Mr. Allen was surprised, but his surprise passed immediately under his control. "Of course you are aware," he said quietly, "that you have the choice between calling up and being shot."

"And you are aware," David returned, "that you have the choice between calling up and shooting."

Mr. Allen was silent a moment. "The killing of a man who enters your house is justified by law," he warned grimly.

"Well—why don't you shoot?"

"Are you going to call up?"

"So then—you're afraid to shoot!" taunted David.

Mr. Allen remained silent. He gazed at David over the pistol barrel, and David gazed back at the pistol and at Mr. Allen. Their wills had locked horns, stood braced.

"I'm getting very tired," said David, throwing a leg over a corner of the table. "If you don't shoot soon I'll have to go."

At this instant David saw in the doorway behind Mr. Allen the small figure of Kate Morgan. In her right hand there shone a little pistol, in her left she held a heavy walking-stick.

Mr. Allen broke his silence. "If you make a move toward your pocket while I cross the floor, it'll be your last move."

David's will had conquered, but his exultation did not speak. He was watching Kate Morgan, fascinated. Her pistol rose, then fell, and the pistol and walking-stick exchanged hands. Mr. Allen took the first step toward the telephone. The stick came up, whizzed down upon Mr. Allen's pistol hand. The weapon went flying upon the rug, and Mr. Allen let out a sharp cry and started to whirl around. As the stick struck flesh David sprang forward, and with the skill of his old boxing-days, with all his strength and weight focussed in the blow, he drove his fist against Mr. Allen's unguarded chin. Mr. Allen fell limply upon the deep carpet.

"Come on! Out of here!" cried David, seizing Kate's arm.

She jerked away and stood tensely erect, glaring at him. "Go, you coward! I stay here!"

"But you'll get caught!"

"That's my business!" she blazed. "Get out!—I'm going to finish the job."

She whirled about, jerked the handkerchief from her face, thrust it into Allen's mouth, and tied this gag securely in place with a handkerchief which she took from the pocket of Allen's dressing-gown. Then she tied his feet with the dressing-gown's rope girdle, and his hands with one of the silken ropes that held back the hangings in the broad doorway. This done, she sprang to the electric-light key, and the room filled with blackness.

She flashed her lantern on David, who had stood watching her rapid actions in amazement. "Why don't you go? Get out!"

"See here, it's crazy to stay here. You know it. You've got to come with me."

His lantern, which he had taken up, showed a face that darted scorn and rage. "Go with you?—I'll die first!" she returned in a low, fierce whisper. And then she added, each slow word edged with infinite contempt:

"Oh, what a poor damned coward!"

He quivered, but he said quietly, "If you won't go, I'll stay with you."

"Stay with me? You'll not! I won't have you!"

She turned abruptly and left the room. He stood thinking for a space; then he went out and crept down the stairway. As he passed the drawing-room door he saw Kate bending in front of the open curio cabinet. He crept down another flight to the first floor and hid himself behind a palm in an angle of the great hall. He strained his ears for trouble, ready to rush upstairs at the first sound. After a time a wand of light was thrust down the stairway. Then came Kate, the suit-case in one hand, feeling her way with the wand like a blind man with a cane. For a moment the searching light pierced through the palm into his face, and David thought he was discovered; but she glided on and down the basement stairs. He let several minutes pass; then he too slipped out into the street.

Perhaps it was chance, perhaps it was the direction of the subconscious, that led David in his circuitous homeward journey, past St. Christopher's Mission. He was walking slowly along, the caution of the first part of his flight forgotten in the mixture of despair and shame that now possessed him, when he waded into pools of coloured light that lay upon the sidewalk and the street. He looked up. There, aglow with its inspiration, was the window to the memory of Philip Morton. He involuntarily stepped back a pace or two, and leaning against a stack of bricks designed for repairs in the Mission's basement, alone in the deserted street, he gazed steadfastly at the luminous words.

He had often looked at that tribute, as he had upon the whole Mission, with a sense of thankfulness that his life was counting. But now there was no thankfulness within him. Anger began to burn, revolt to rise. That sainted man there was the cause of all his misery, all his degradation. The shame of his trial, the loss of his four prison years, the refusal of work, his insults, his lost strength, his lost character, his ragged clothes, his starving, his uttermost poverty, his uttermost despair—all these rushed upon him in one hot turbulent flood of rebellion. Of all these inflictions that man was directly the cause! And more—that man had made him a thief! And yet that man was worshipped as a saint—while he, he was a starving outcast!

His resentment culminated in a wild impulse. His right hand clutched one of the bricks on which it rested, and he took a quick step forward. The brick crashed through Morton's glowing name.