Boardman's heavy, restraining hand grasped the deserted
husband's arm. "Mr. Ferris," he gravely said. "Our future course
will be dictated by your behavior. You must only communicate with
the Trading Company's lawyers on these affairs. As to the Worthington
Estate, there is our representative, Mr. Witherspoon. And, in the
interests of justice, bestir yourself now to find Randall Clayton's
murderer.

"The chief of police has his eyes specially upon you, and so, I
give you a fair warning."

Ferris, with flashing eyes, essayed to speak, but Boardman
significantly ushered him to the door. "It is peace or war, as you
will have it! We three men have all the secrets of the past. If you
attempt, in the slightest degree, to annoy our principal, we will
strike, and without mercy."

As the defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the
beautiful Central Park--the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered
maze of brick and iron monstrosity--he saw his life lying sere and
yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched before their time.

"Ruin, ruin," he murmured, and a craven fear now possessed him--a
fear born of his ignorance of the awful remorse of the dying hours
of the Croesus, the moneyed giant cut off in the midst of all his
schemes!

"How much do they know?" he murmured.

Rage filled his stormy heart; he would have struck back as madly as
the blind rattlesnake but for the craven fears which now assailed
him.

"I must await my time for revenge," he muttered. "One touch of
publicity in this, and Senator Dunham would chase me out of America.
He must, at the last, protect me, if only to save himself."

Stunned by the sudden onslaught of the girl whom he had supposed
to be but a pliant, hoodwinked child, Ferris sat long pondering
gloomily in his rooms at the Fifth Avenue, his head buried in his
hands.

The weary hours passed in alternations of rage and despair.
Haggard-eyed Ferris sprang to the door in the early evening gloom,
as a sharp knock roused him. When Policeman Dennis McNerney entered,
he gazed wonderingly at the young lawyer.

"What's come over you?" demanded the officer. "You have heard the
news? I did not dare to go up to the office, and so I waited till
you had finished your dinner."

Ferris wearily gazed at his visitor. "What do you mean? I'm sick.
I'm going away for a change, and I've turned the whole thief-catching
business over to Stillwell, the company's lawyer."

The policeman st