y. I should have gone
to church regularly, and if possible I should have filled some
minor public offices. You may call this bourgeois--it was my idea of
happiness."

"Was!" she murmured.

"Is still," he declared, sharply, "but I shall never attain to it.
To-night I had to leave Maud--to leave the supper table of Daisy
Villa--through the window!"

She looked at him in amazement.

"The police," he explained. "That brute Dory was at the bottom of it."

"But surely," she murmured, "you told me that you had a bona-fide
situation--"

"So I had," he declared, "and I was a fool not to be content with it.
It was my habit of taking long country walks, and their rotten auditing,
which undid me! You understand that this was all before I met Maud?
Since the day I spoke to her, I turned over a new leaf. I have left the
night work alone, and I repaid every penny of the firm's money which
they could ever have possibly found out about. There was only that one
little affair of mine down at Sudbury."

"Tell me what you are going to do?" she whispered.

"I have no alternative," he answered. "The law has kicked me out from
the respectable places. The law shall pay!"

She looked at him with glowing eyes.

"Have you any plans?" she asked, softly.

"I have," he answered. "I have considered the subject from a good many
points of view, and I have decided to start in business for myself as a
private detective."

She raised her eyebrows.

"My dear Peter!" she murmured. "Couldn't you be a little more original?"

"That is only what I am going to call myself," he answered. "I may tell
you that I am going to strike out on somewhat new lines."

"Please explain," she begged.

He recrossed his knees and made himself a little more comfortable.

"The weak part of every great robbery, however successful," he began,
"is the great wastage in value which invariably results. For jewels
which cost--say five thousand pounds, and to procure which the artist
has to risk his life as well as his liberty, he has to consider
himself lucky if he clears eight hundred. For the Hermitage rubies, for
instance, where I nearly had to shoot a man dead, I realized rather less
than four hundred pounds. It doesn't pay."

"Go on," she begged.

"I am not clear," he continued, "how far this class of business will
attract me at all, but I do not propose, in any case, to enter into any
transactions on my own account. I shall work for other people, and for
ca