Folly McFee whipped her hand away with a jerk, her round eyes consulted Lanyard's, in that furtive tone which people seem instinctively to adopt in times of apprehension, irrespective of the possibility of being overheard, "What can that mean?" she demanded—"at this hour of morning! Who can it be?"

"One or more of our fancy friends, undoubtedly," Lanyard replied with comforting absence of agitation—"calling to enquire if you got safely home—with, I'll wager, some transparent excuse for having left you to shift for yourself during the raid."

"But," the woman boggled, with a frown, "I don't want to see them . . . And all the servants are in bed . . ."

"Then I'm afraid there's no way out of it." Lanyard moved toward the hall door as the bell sounded another and more imperative stridulation. "Let me—"

"No," Folly decided, darting ahead—"I'll let them in. But I do wish I didn't have to."

"Then remember," Lanyard enjoined: "better not give them any reason to suspect I have warned you . . ."

"I understand." She paused an instant, nodding back to him. "I'll do my best. But promise me one thing: you won't leave me alone with them."

He promised, a gay flirt of that fair head thanked him, Folly vanished. And in another moment Lanyard heard her give little cries of elation whose ring was as true as one could wish: "Liane! Peter! how sweet of you both!" And the listener gave a nod of thoughtful approbation.

The dry accents of Mr. Pagan replied: "I told Liane you were all right, but she wouldn't hear of going home without stopping to make sure . . ."

"Oh I'm all right, of course! Mr. Lanyard brought me home. Thanks to him we didn't have the least trouble. But do come in, both of you, and tell him how you got out of it."

Liane was heard to consent, stipulating, however, that they would stop only a moment; and the three entered the study to find Lanyard at a wide window in the rear wall, thoughtfully peering out through its tear-blinded panes.

"Ah! ah! my friend," Liane saluted him in lively imitation of the tone she might have used to a child caught in mild mischief; and wagged a forefinger of reproof. "What are you up to there?"

"Trying to make out whether or not it's raining," Lanyard serenely explained, dropping the draperies his hands had parted.

"You might have waited to enquire of us."

"Judging by the state of mind you and Monsieur Pagan were betraying when I saw you last," Lanyard retorted, "it seemed fair to doubt whether you'd pay much attention to a drop or two of water." He comprehended Pagan in a lightly mocking bow. "You might tell us—we've been no end mystified—"

"I know," Mr. Pagan interrupted brightly. "You want the answer to that historical riddle: Where was Morphew when the lights went out?"

"Not where he was, monsieur, but where he went—and not alone—and with such amazing expedition."

"We didn't know what to think," Folly declared. "You vanished from that room like tumblers in a pantomime."

"It was very simple," Pagan glibly elucidated: "Everybody seemed to be making for the roof, so we followed the crowd."

"Presuming, of course," Liane amended, "you would, as well."

"You see," commented Lanyard, nodding to Folly, "how simply some things may be explained!" And thereby earned, and enjoyed, a resentful look from Pagan. "And did you actually get away across the roofs?"

"Unhappily, no. Those wretched police were up there, too," said Liane, with disgust. "So we had to go back and line up with the rest and give our pedigrees."

"Monsieur Morphew, too?" Lanyard's tone was skeptical. "And that so charming Monsieur Mallison?"

"All of us," Pagan snapped in a strangely sour temper. "That's what delayed us."

"Frankly, monsieur, you surprise me."

"How so?"

"Why! if I were in Monsieur Morphew's shoes—"

"You'd rattle," Pagan asserted.

"What a literal mind you have, my friend! Well; but if I were, like that good soul, head of an institution so exposed to police attentions, I would be at pains to provide myself with more than one secret avenue of escape—when the lights were out."

"You've got to make allowances for Morph," Pagan blandly declared; "he hasn't had your early advantages."

"What do I see?" Apparently possessed by the belief that some sharp distraction was indicated if open hostilities were to be averted, Liane pounced upon Lanyard's barely tasted highball. "And this hour I have been dying of thirst!" She gulped with gusto, making eyes at Lanyard over the glass. "Yours, my friend? Never mind: Folly will fetch you another."

"Do with a drink myself," Pagan volunteered. "No, don't you trouble, Mrs. McFee, I know the way."

He ducked briskly out into the hall and was presently heard in the dining-room making melody with glasses and siphons and ice.

Liane set aside an empty glass, crossed to Lanyard, and petted his cheek with the authentic professional touch. "You mustn't mind Peter, mon coco," she cooed affectionately in French. "He presumes, perhaps, but then he's a privileged type."

"Mind him?" Lanyard questioned in a tone that implied he found the thought weird. "Vermin, my dear Liane, were ever my pet aversion. If you set any value on this insect, be good enough to keep him out from under my feet."

"Every time you do that," Folly grumbled in English, "you make me sick, to think of all the youth I wasted studying what I fondly thought was French."

Liane turned with a murmur of self-reproach, and gracefully posing on the broad arm of the easy chair passed a fair arm round Folly's even fairer shoulders.

"Forgive me, my pretty. Michael and I knew each other so long ago in that dear Paris of before the War, it goes against Nature to converse with him in any tongue but French. . . . Ah! my old one," she lamented to Lanyard. "Those old days! will we ever know their like again?"

Mistrustful of her drift, Lanyard briefly replied: "God forbid!"

Timely to catch the sense of these latter lines, Pagan returned, his countenance of a clown radiant with good nature restored by the fragrance of four eight-inch glasses on the tray beneath his nose.

"The dilute laughter of the peasants of Scotland," he announced, presenting the tray to Folly and Liane—"guaranteed to cure every heartache born of pining for a past that, if the truth were known, probably wasn't half so pleasant as the present—Prohibition and everything!" He presented the tray to Lanyard in turn, then, determined at all costs to win the centre of the stage, struck an absurd declamatory attitude. "To tonight and tomorrow," he toasted—"to hell with yesterday! Why waste good time mourning that which is immortal, anyway? All of yesterday that mattered we carry with us, imperishably enshrined in our hearts. After all, what is the present more than the past plus? What man was yesterday, he is today, with something added. Eh, Mr. Lanyard?"

"Or subtracted."

"I disagree"—Pagan made him a formal salute—"with all due respect. Man adds daily to the sum of his experiences, which sum he is; but he can never subtract from that sum one iota of what he has been. The peasant who becomes a financier remains at heart a peasant still."

"A pretty thought," Liane interpolated with earnest interest. "But, to a woman, somewhat unsettling, is it not?"

Pagan stared: "How unsettling?"

"Why! by what you tell me, I find myself still a virgin."

"Don't be depressing. Here am I, being deuced entertaining and eloquent and profound, philosophizing on matters of the spirit, while you . . . Bah!" quoth Pagan. "But to continue: Give the financier who was a peasant respite from his cares, and whither turns his heart? Back to the stage of his young days; if he takes a vacation, he spends it in overalls down on the farm."

"And yours, one presumes, are devoted to making records for the gramophone?"

"Don't interrupt, Liane. . . . Or take, say a criminal who has abandoned his misguided ways and become a respected member of the community. How will he relax? Eh, Mr. Lanyard?"

"I will not presume to instruct monsieur on a point concerning which he is undoubtedly better informed than I."

Liane exploded a "Ho!" of pure joy, and Pagan shot Lanyard an envenomed glance which he was swift to mask with his well-worn smirk. "To be frank," he generously admitted, dropping into a conversational tone, "I had the Lone Wolf in mind. They say the fellow is here, in New York, now, and up to his old games again. I confess the thought rides my imagination, the puzzle of it. By all accounts, he went straight for years. How, then, came he to backslide? Were the claims of the past too strong? or the demands of the present? Does he steal today deliberately for gain? or involuntarily at the dictates of some subtle and deathless instinct?"

"But monsieur has so many entertaining theories, surely he will produce one to cover this hypothetical instance."

"I don't know. Nature is too strong for us, she laughs at all our efforts to revise her. We may repress and inhibit our native instincts as much as we will, but in the end, as a rule, they have their way. The Psychical Research Society reported, not long ago, the case of a man in whom the influence of instincts developed in early professional life were so strong that, buried though his criminal past was under a dozen years of law-abiding life, he reverted to old practices from time to time without knowing what he did; that is to say, in spells of amnesia, during which his first personality, the natural man, broke through the veneer of the secondary or artificial personality with which he had so painstakingly overlaid it. A safe-breaker and jewel thief like this Lone Wolf. Interesting if this were another such case."

"Interesting, indeed, monsieur, if conceivable."

"But think a minute, and I believe you'll admit it's easily conceivable. Imagine such a man, with wits and senses all habituated by years of rigorous training to serve his predatory nature. Because he's trying to live an honest life today doesn't mean that those old, ingrained habits have necessarily ceased to function. To the contrary, I imagine, they are always at work. As he goes to and fro and meets men and women who invite him into their homes—in their ignorance of his former identity, of course—inevitably, I maintain, such a man will always be observing and valuing and formulating plans of attack—subconsciously, perhaps, but still and for all that making use of the faculties he trained in other days. I can believe he never visits a home of any consequence without taking away with him a comprehensive scheme for burglarizing it. As you or I might, Mr. Lanyard, if either of us had the education of the Lone Wolf, say in respect of this very house. . . . And then some night, when he's least dreaming of anything of the sort, the old Adam reasserts itself, without or with his will and cognizance—"

Perhaps a little frightened by the gleam in Lanyard's eyes and the tension of his lips, Liane bounced up vivaciously, ran to Pagan, and clapped a palm over his mouth.

"Peter!" she cried—"you make me tired, you talk so much. Once you get started, you never know when to stop. But now you will stop, I insist that you stop and take me home. It is nearly three, and I am weary to the marrow of my bones, too fatigued to listen another instant to your twaddle."

Lanyard contrived with fair enough grace to decline Pagan's magnanimous offer of a lift in his car; but by the time he found himself on Fifth avenue again was half sorry he had. There were no taxicabs cruising for fares at that hour, at least all he spied were tearing along with metal flags reversed; and his head was at one and the same time buzzing with fumes of whiskey and thick with that drowsiness of which he had first become sensible in the cab with Folly McFee. Singularly enough, that cloud had lifted during his stop in her home, whereas since leaving it, ever since he had drawn his first breath of the dank, chill air of the streets, his wits had been like slugs fumbling blindly in a bed of cotton-wool. Now his feet as well were beginning to feel leaden, walking, ordinarily a source of such keen enjoyment to this man of vigorous physical life, had become a task.

Hard to understand how one could have been so affected by the scanty ration of alcohol one had consumed that evening, a solitary glass of champagne at the Clique, a single Scotch and soda two hours later. It might be, of course, that Pagan had mixed too stiff a highball. One hadn't been so impressed while drinking, but now the flavour of the whisky clung to the palate, harshly reminiscent. Evidently not such good stuff as it had seemed at the first sip.

Odd to find oneself resuming one's homeward walk at almost the very point where that rencontre with Liane had interrupted it. Still more odd, how that affair had resulted; in three brief hours everything had come true that one had foretold in seeking to dissuade Eve from the idea of marriage . . .

In a surge of grim rage Lanyard pledged Morphew and Pagan ample grounds for repentance should they show any disposition to persist in tampering with his concerns.

Then he found occasion to execrate the weather, too, perceiving that it had been only holding off till now, when it had him at its mercy. Now all at once it ceased to tease and settled down to rain in dogged earnest and get the business over with.

And still no taxis . . .

Lanyard turned up the collar of his overcoat and dug both hands into its pockets, clipping stick under arm and plodding heavily through the shining puddles, with every labored step growing more conscious of bodily oppression and the lethargy that ruled his mind, feeling more abused in some vague how and aggrieved.

In the many-hued lights of the street the back-spatter of raindrops drilling on the sidewalk churned in rainbow iridescence, a froth of phantom jewels, enchanting, evanescent . . .

Strange that one should never have remarked this effect ere now . . . Stranger still how blindly man was wont to move through the world, benighted to its wonders, only in rare moments cheating the bandages with which individualism sealed his eyes and catching glimpses fugitive and ravishing of beauty adorning the most hackneyed ways . . . As now when, lifting dazzled eyes, Lanyard beheld himself a lonely way-farer in a lane of jewels set in jet and gold . . .

Jewels that outrivalled even those the Sultan of Loot had paraded, and Liane, and that other woman . . . pretty little thing so well named . . . What the deuce was her name? Folly? Folly McFee!

Idiotic to mislay so soon a distinctive name like that . . .

Wading in jewels. Up to one's knees. As Liane waded in them, and Folly, and the Sultan of Loot . . . Between them these three must have had on display that night stones that would fetch four or five hundred thousand . . . flaunting them in the face of a pauper!

A pauper? Well: little better! Penniless, or next door to it. A few more days of running round with Eve . . . who must never guess . . . and he would be stoney. Not pinched for money—broke. The reward of virtue . . .

Lanyard laughed aloud, a cracked, ugly laugh.

Pagan hadn't been far wrong. Impertinent clown! Not far wrong, at that . . . Anything but easy to forget the cunning one once had gloried in, to remain forever deaf and dumb to the insidious prompting of instincts which, as long as the sun shone, seemed to have been utterly stamped out and exterminated, but which, when clouds massed and the wind bared its teeth, had an accursed habit of proving they had been but rebelliously quiescent . . .

Curious, how close to the line that mountebank had hewn in his guesswork at the psychology of the outlaw reclaimed!

There lingered still a picture instantaneously printed upon the sensitive film of consciousness, in that moment when Lanyard had stood peering out of the rear window at Folly McFee's: a view of the roof of a one-storey extension running back from the window, a flat roof decked over to serve as a terrace in warm weather, with, beyond it, thanks to an excavation being dug for a new building on the north side of the block, nothing between the house and the next street but a board fence enclosing the kitchen-yard. An open invitation to any man who might fancy the jewels of Folly McFee; jewels that, shrewdly marketed, would put a careful man beyond want for the rest of his days . . .

Lanyard growled an oath, gave himself an angry shake. What the devil had got into him tonight, that he should consent for a single instant to indulge such a train of thought?

Not that there was danger of his being tempted . . . He gave a thick chuckle of scorn. Nevertheless it was annoying to find oneself unable to forget that the temptation was there.

All the fault of that reptile with his viperous tongue and machine-made leer, What's-his-name . . . What was his name? Fagin? No: Pagan. Loathsome creature . . .

What an ass one had been to swallow his insolence simply because there were women present, to let such an illogical consideration restrain one from yielding to natural, primitive impulse and, with every provocation, throttling the fellow, wringing his scrawny neck . . .

In amaze Lanyard emerged from a seizure of sodden insanity to find himself at halt in front of the Waldorf, standing quite still in the driving rain and glaring at his hands, which were extended with tensed fingers compressing the windpipe of an imaginary victim.

What was he doing? He made an effort to pull himself together, and cast glances right and left, shame-faced to think that he might have been seen. But there was not another soul in sight on the whole, undulant length of the Avenue. Only a taxi shot past, and its driver hooted . . .

He seemed to have mislaid his stick. After a moment of myopic searching he gave it up, pocketed his hands and lunged on. . . . Not far to go now; but one made indifferent progress because of the fog. Of course it was fog! What else could make the lights so dim? Like a London fog, a London particular. And getting thicker every minute, blotting out the lights as a blotting paper sops up ink, leaving only blurs, faint and formless blotches fading into night absolute, black and steaming . . .

In a sudden saffron blaze Lanyard identified the common aspect of the small suite of rooms which he rented furnished. He was in the sitting-room, wrestling with his overcoat. Soaked through and dripping, the wretched thing seemed possessed of a devil of perversity which resisted all his efforts to shed it. He gave an infuriated wriggle, heard something rip, and discovered, in some surprise, that he was rid of it. Then with indignation he saw that the door stood open to the public hall, a staring oblong of black in the lighted walls. Lurching to this, Lanyard flung it shut with a thundering crash.

The problem of escaping from the intimate embrace of his dress-coat next engaged his intelligence. Something he couldn't afford to tear off his back. Yet he darkly foresaw difficulties. After a while of pondering, a spirit of low cunning prompted him to try to deceive the thing by making believe he didn't care whether it came off or not. . . . And astonishingly it appeared that this strategem had been successful: he was holding the garment in his hands. With the harsh, unfeeling laugh of a conqueror he cast it from him and shaped a course for his bedchamber. And barely in time: that London fog had stolen in after him somehow, probably through the door he had carelessly left open, Heaven knew how long. . . . At its old tricks, dimming down the lights till one could hardly see. Rapidly, too. He succeeded in beating the darkness to his bed, but with nothing to spare: as he sat on its edge, fumbling with his shoes, night whelmed the world with a stunning crash . . .

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