w I trust you," she brightly said, meeting his glance frankly
at last. "Be at the arch in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, next Sunday
at two.

"If you have a closed carriage we can drive an hour in the park.
If we must say farewell, we can say it then. For even when I met
you first, in that crowded street, I felt that in some strange
freemasonry of Life, we were to be friends."

A single frightened, warning gesture recalled him to his senses,
as Irma pointed to her nodding companion. "You do not know how
jealous artists are.

"One single imprudence would be my professional ruin; my career
would be blasted. Trust to me! Obey me; swear that you will not
follow me, and we shall meet again, for I would not lose you from
my life." He took the roses from her bosom and kissed them.

"Go, now," she whispered, "but only that we may meet again! I have
your promise."

"Loyal to the death," swore Clayton, as he kissed her trembling
hands and then stole away, leaving her there alone with pallid lips
and a wildly beating heart.

Clayton had taken up the burden of his unfinished day's business
before the carriage left the "Bavaria," and swiftly traversing
Fourth Avenue, passed along to the Thirty-fourth Street ferry.

There was but one occupant, however, for Madame Raffoni had silently
disappeared before the diva, heavily veiled, entered the vehicle.

Clayton wondered at the protracted absence of his office boy,
ignorant that the young double spy was standing before the Restaurant
Bavaria watching Leah Einstein's furtive disappearance.

And neither the lad, astounded as his mother's unaccustomed finery,
nor the love-blinded Randall Clayton ever knew that "Madame Raffoni"
hastened to Magdal's Pharmacy to whisper to Mr. Fritz Braun tidings
which brought a surging swell of triumph into that arch plotter's
heart.

"Leah! You are a wonder, after all," was the comment of her old
lover. "Keep this whole matter quiet. Hoodwink them all! And that
pair of diamond ear-rings you dreamed of may fall your way at last!"
The poor cast-off woman swore a blind obedience to her lover once,
her tyrant still.

The adroit Timmins laughed in his heart when his employer, deliberately
closing his cabinet, left the shop an hour earlier than usual on
this particularly auspicious afternoon.

Fritz Braun's eyes gleamed viciously behind the blue glass screens
as he sedately boarded his car. "Things are coming my way at last,"
he said. "I must not hurry,