Confident that their interview just ended had converted an active antagonist, the most dangerous he knew because the most intelligent and dispassionately devoted to his duty, into at worst a passive opponent disposed to let the benefit be his of any legitimate doubt and to adopt a policy of hands-off in as far as Lanyard's still nebulous plans might affect a common enemy; confident as well that the change in his appearance insured against casual identification by any other adversary, public or private: Lanyard on leaving Crane none the less went his way as warily as one who walked in living dread of being ambushed at every corner.

From the door of the building in which Crane lodged to the maw of an underground railway station was only a step, but a step which Lanyard took with all the furtive haste of a ghost belated at the hour of cockcrow. The last coin that lined his pockets passed him through a clattering turnstile to a bare platform from which, while waiting for one of the occasional trains of the post-midnight schedule, he watched both entrances with eyes quick in the cast shadow of a ragged hat-brim. But not another soul followed into the station, he was able to board a northbound train unvexed by any hint of espionage; though he reckoned this poor compensation for a sense of quandary only aggravated by advices which, dependable though he must hold them, coming as they had from Crane, had paradoxically proved more benighting than otherwise with the new light they shed upon his dark perplexities.

He knew no amazement in the discovery that Liane had lightly trifled with the truth in her version of his seven months of lost existence; but her capricious warping of certain facts and suppression of others only added one more mystery to that company whose faces of empty imbecility now mocked every waking effort to read their meaning and, when Lanyard slept, like nightmares drifted through his dreams. Not that he found it hard to understand that she had woven her tissue of deception hoping thereby to fix a lien upon his gratitude. Either he had been her lover for a time, as she asserted, and she was bent on holding him by hook or crook, or he had not and she thought to win him by making him believe himself bound to her in honour; wherefore the inventions of the purloined necklace and the forced flight from New York that had been infeasible without her friendly offices, as well as of the sanctuary and aid that Liane claimed to have given Lanyard when he was hard pressed in his flagrant course as the Lone Wolf redivivus.

In this last allegation there might be, no doubt there was, some half-truth latent: Lanyard was not yet prepared to deny that the Lone Wolf had lately prowled again in his own flesh if in his mental dissociation; but the conflict of testimony that proved the distortion to Liane's purposes of half the truth at least made it competent to him to question whether her story had had any foundation in the truth whatever. Certain it was—Crane's word for this—that Lanyard's long absence from the city had failed to put a period to that sequence of thievish feats which New York credited to the Lone Wolf's cunning. And, as Lanyard had insisted, there was nothing to show that the author of these more recent exploits had not been the author likewise of the series which had predated his flight. Nothing forbade his hugging that contention to his heart and getting what comfort he could of it.

As a matter of fact, he got precious little: nothing seemed of any real moment, just then, measured by the riddle of Eve's return to France as the report of the Hotel Walpole posed it; a statement which circumstantially refuted Liane's account of that event, which happened unhappily to be the only explanation Lanyard could accept without reluctance. By the implications inherent in Liane's version, the lovers had parted prior to the beginning of that bad new chapter in the history of the Lone Wolf, had parted in tenderness and sadly, because of Lanyard's set refusal to let Eve link her life with that of a reclaimed criminal. And with all his heart Lanyard wanted to believe it had been so. . . . But Crane asserted that the Lone Wolf had been active in New York before Christmas, and that Liane had been deported during the month of February, while the Hotel Walpole fixed the date of Eve's departure on the ninth of March! Liane, then, could have had no personal acquaintance with the reasons which had impelled Eve to leave America. But could they have been anything else than heartbreak resulting from failure to reanimate the spirit of the man she loved in the being of the Lone Wolf?

Would he ever know? Never, he told himself, from the lips of Eve. Inconceivable that she should ever again consent to see him, believing what she must believe, or even to read his letters—assuming that he could find the effrontery so to importune her. Nothing short of full exoneration could revive her faith in him; and even given that, Lanyard would hardly find it in his heart to blame her did she shrink from meeting him, being seen with him, letting her name be coupled in the public mouth with the name of one who had been singled out by the spotlight of a notoriety so shameful.

No: he must count Eve lost to him for all time and soothe that wound, if he could, with the assurance that it was better so.

But before he could become reconciled to that renunciation he must possess the truth in his own knowledge, the truth whole and unvarnished.

So now he was striking directly at the heart of darkness in which, he was satisfied, the truth lay perdu.

Ten minutes from Crane's door he came up for air from the Plaza station of the Subway, slipped into Central Park like a snake into a thicket, and was lost to human sight for more than half an hour thereafter. Then the lights of Central Park West picked him up at Seventy-seventh street; and striking diagonally across the grounds of the Museum of Natural History he threaded quiet residential streets to Riverside Drive, upon which he turned north, moving with the carefree slouch of the vagabond he so picturesquely seemed to be. A policeman on patrol, nobody else, gave him a second glance in passing, saw that he was sober, dismissed him as a figure of no potential consequence for either good or ill.

The night, seasonably intemperate, might have been compounded according to his own prescription, so excellently suited it was to his purpose. Its heat had made the parks populous with refugees from sweltering apartments; at this late hour they lingered still upon the walks, the lawns and benches in sufficient numbers to render Lanyard's restless presence equally inconspicuous with uncounted others. A tenuous haze dimmed the lustre of the sluggish flood of ink that was the Hudson River and turned distant lights into pulsing points of iridescence. The driveway proper droned wearily with its steady if diminished flow of motor traffic.

Morphew's town-house stood apart from less pretentious neighbors, a four-square lump of unlovely masonry squatting, with a singular effect of family likeness to its owner, in grounds more ample than even opulence is wont to run to for its city pieds-À-terre. Open windows and unboarded doors showed it had not been shut up for the Summer, though Morphew were, as Crane had intimated, sojourning somewhere out of Town. And the lack of illumination other than a soft night-light behind the iron grille and plate-glass of its great front doors seemed to advertise a household sensibly abed. The sharp eyes beneath the brim of that disreputable hat had marked down half a dozen avenues of easy if unconventional entrance before Lanyard, with his idlest air, turned off from the main promenade that runs with the driveway and found a soft spot on a lawn where a clump of shrubbery, standing between him and the nearest street lamps, threw a shadow black as jet.

Here, in a lazy sprawl, he rested for upwards of an hour, covert attention constant to the mansion across the Drive. In that time it gave no evidence of wakeful occupation; but as break of dawn drew near the population of the park dispersed and the tide of wheeled traffic became an intermittent trickle, lessening the risk of observation that he must chance when the time came to put his purpose into effect. In this last he went ahead unhindered by any scruple, holding Morphew solely answerable, as he did, for all the tribulations that had been visited upon him since that long ago night of their first acquaintance. Eight months of enforced submission to the wear and tear of Morphew's malevolence had brought him to the pass in which tonight found him, penniless, homeless, hungry, a hunted thing without a friend to turn to. It devolved upon Morphew, consequently, to bow to the inexorable workings of the law of compensation and stand to Lanyard now in the place of friend, willy-nilly to furnish him food and drink, shelter and change of raiment, set his mind at rest upon the matters that most distressed it, and finally put money in his pockets. Morphew could afford all that and never miss its cost to him out of the profits he must have piled up as impresario for the Lone Wolf's farewell tour.

The irony of that conceit was pleasing: Lanyard wore a grim smile beneath his beard as he addressed him to his burglarious business.

The point of attack he had settled on was a window with a balcony in the second storey, on the south side of the house, the farthest removed from the more exposed face which fronted on the Drive. The mouth of the tradesmen's entrance, an alley closed by a gate of iron work, made it possible to attempt the ascent in comparative darkness, and horizontal channels between the huge blocks of hewn stone furnished helpful foot and hand-holds. Only the rawest new beginner in the sodality of second-storey workers could have made any difficulty about that climb: Lanyard negotiated it with the ease of a lizard—two minutes after his subtle shadow had faded from the cross-town street into the tradesmen's entrance he had gained the level of the balcony and, plastered against those cool cheeks of stone, was inching round the corner. At the end of another minute he silently but rapidly wriggled in over the balcony rail and dropped flat to its floor, there to wait without stir, for so long that he might have been suddenly petrified by appreciation of his own temerity, till senses tuned up to the utmost of their fine efficiency assured him he had not been seen from the street or from any window looking out upon it, and that the room beyond the window at his side was as still as death; the circumstance that it was a French window with both wings folded back into its recess rendering it not necessarily idiotic to trust to his super-acute hearing.

On the inside of the recess hung open draperies of heavy stuff. Between them no light showed. Lanyard surmised a living-room beyond, a study or a dining-room: the bedchambers would be on the floor above. One quick crouching stride passed him in between the hangings, another, in the course of which he stood up, took him to the middle of the room, where he stopped short, poised tensely upon the balls of his feet, like a jungle creature scenting human flesh in the wind—galvanized by the whiff of rich cigar smoke that told him he had walked into a trap. Simultaneously the wings of the window banged to behind him, its latch rattled, curtain-rings clashed upon a tube of brass, the bleached blue oblong of the glass was blacked out, and he stood encompassed by night absolute—only the ember at the end of a cigar blinked at him from a little distance, glowing and fading by turns like an eye of basilisk spite.

With escape by the way he had entered surely blocked, and standing on unknown ground, without one clue to the location of any other exit, he had no choice but to wait for light before adventuring another step. But seconds dragged like minutes and still the darkness held unbroken: they were playing with him, giving uncertainty time to sap his nerve. In exasperation, but schooling his voice to a sulky key, he said: "Well! you've got me. Make a light."

No one answered, no light was made . . .

In a grimmer tone he spoke again: "I'll give you a count of three in which to make a light. If you don't, I'll drill a bullet through whatever happens to be twelve inches below that cigar."

The eye of fire burned a more sardonic crimson; that was all.

In sheer bravado he began to count: "One—two—"

A whistle lanced the stillness, he was sensitive to a sudden stir at his back and swung about, striking out at random and without effect; a savage blow, likewise launched at random, fell notwithstanding squarely upon his cheek, just forward of the ear; staggered, he reeled sideways and blundered into a brace of ready arms. Before he could recover and set himself to break that hold other arms found and wrapped his body round from behind, a deft foot kicked his heels from under him, and, fighting like a maniac, Lanyard took the floor with a crash that made its timbers groan, beneath a writhing mass of humanity whose weight alone was enough to crush him into breathless quiescence.

Overhead a prism chandelier blazed out like a sun-burst . . .

Pinned down by no less than five huskies, one to each arm and leg and one, inevitably the stoutest, digging hard knees into his chest, Lanyard turned his head to one side to give his eyes respite from than blinding glare above, and lay looking directly into the apathetic mask of Morphew.