move would be to find her. And then, at any cost, the truth must
be wrung from her.

Never-Fail Blake, from the obscure down-town hotel, into which he crept
like a sick hound shunning the light, sent out his call for Elsie
Verriner. He sent his messages to many and varied quarters, feeling
sure that some groping tentacle of inquiry would eventually come in
touch with her.

Yet the days dragged by, and no answer came back to him. He chafed
anew at this fresh evidence that his power was a thing of the past,
that his word was no longer law. He burned with a sullen and
self-consuming anger, an anger that could be neither expressed in
action nor relieved in words.

Then, at the end of a week's time, a note came from Elsie Verriner. It
was dated and postmarked "Washington," and in it she briefly explained
that she had been engaged in Departmental business, but that she
expected to be in New York on the following Monday. Blake found
himself unreasonably irritated by a certain crisp assurance about this
note, a certain absence of timorousness, a certain unfamiliar tone of
independence. But he could afford to wait, he told himself. His hour
would come, later on. And when that hour came, he would take a crimp
out of this calm-eyed woman, or the heavens themselves would fall! And
finding further idleness unbearable, he made his way to a
drinking-place not far from that juncture of First Street and the
Bowery, known as Suicide Corner. In this new-world _Cabaret de Neant_
he drowned his impatience of soul in a Walpurgis Night of five-cent
beer and fusel-oil whiskey. But his time would come, he repeated
drunkenly, as he watched with his haggard hound's eyes the meretricious
and tragic merriment of the revelers about him--his time would come!

XVIII

Blake did not look up as he heard the door open and the woman step into
the room. There was an echo of his old-time theatricalism in that
dissimulation of stolid indifference. But the old-time stage-setting,
he knew, was no longer there. Instead of sitting behind an oak desk at
Headquarters, he was staring down at a beer-stained card-table in the
dingy back room of a dingy downtown hotel.

He knew the woman had closed the door and crossed the room to the other
side of the card-table, but still he did not look up at her. The
silence lengthened until it became acute, epochal, climactic.

"You sent for me?" his visitor finally said.

And as Elsie Verriner utt