Thereupon, the clerk left the room. McMahon took
a chair--not the one towards which the clerk pointed him, but one beside
the desk whereon were lying a number of open letters.

The interrogation always in the mind of a natural criminal, prompted
McMahon to take a seat near the open letters. As soon as the clerk left
the room, a hairy hand reached out for the nearest letter, and a swift
glance took in its contents.

A grimly cheerful, vicious smile lighted up the heavily bearded face.
Placing the letter on the desk again, as soon as it was read, McMahon
almost threw himself over to the chair at some distance from the desk,
which the clerk had first offered him. There he sat with his elbows on
his knees and his chin in his hands when Burlingame entered the room.

Ten minutes later, with a receipted bill in his pocket, Tom McMahon made
for the barber's shop which Mazarine had entered. He found it full, but
seated in the red-plush chair, tipped back at a convenient angle, was
Mazarine undergoing the triple operations of shaving his upper lip,
beard-trimming and haircutting. From that moment and for the rest of all
the long day and evening, Joel Mazarine commanded the unvarying interest
of two members of the McMahon family.

Orlando Guise had had a long day, but one that somehow made him whistle
or sing to himself most of the time. In a way, half a lifetime had gone
since the day before, when he had first seen what he called to himself
"the captive maid." He had never been so happy in his life; and yet he
knew that he had not the faintest right to be happy. The girl who had
so upset his self-control as to make him stumble on her doorstep was the
wife of another man. It was, of course, silly to call him "another man,"
because he seemed a million miles away from any sphere in which Orlando
lived. Yet he was another man; and he was also the husband of the girl
who had made Orlando feel for the very first time a strange singing in
his veins. It actually was as though some wonderful, magnetic thing was
making his veins throb and every nerve tingle and sing.

"It beats me," he said to himself fifty times that day. He had never
been in love. He did not know what it was like, except that he had seen
it make men do silly things, just as drink did. He did not know whether
he was in love or not. It was absurd that a man should be in love with
a face at a window--a face with the beauty of a ghost rather than of a
real live woman.