ered the words he was teased by a vague sense
that the scene had happened before, that somewhere before in their
lives it had been duplicated, word by word and move by move.

"Sit down," he said with an effort at the gruffness of assured
authority. But the young woman did not do as he commanded. She
remained still standing, and still staring down at the face of the man
in front of her.

So prolonged was this stare that Blake began to be embarrassingly
conscious of it, to fidget under it. When he looked up he did so
circuitously, pretending to peer beyond the white face and the staring
eyes of the young woman confronting him. Yet she ultimately coerced
his unsteady gaze, even against his own will. And as he had expected,
he saw written on her face something akin to horror.

As he, in turn, stared back at her, and in her eyes saw first
incredulity, and then, what stung him more, open pity itself, it came
home to him that he must indeed have altered for the worse, that his
face and figure must have changed. For the first time it flashed over
him: he was only the wreck of the man he had once been. Yet at the
core of that wreck burned the old passion for power, the ineradicable
appetite for authority. He resented the fact that she should feel
sorry for him. He inwardly resolved to make her suffer for that pity,
to enlighten her as to what life was still left in the battered old
carcass which she could so openly sorrow over.

"Well, I 'm back," he announced in his guttural bass, as though to
bridge a silence that was becoming abysmal.

"Yes, you 're back!" echoed Elsie Verriner. She spoke absently, as
though her mind were preoccupied with a problem that seemed
inexplicable.

"And a little the worse for wear," he pursued, with his mirthless croak
of a laugh. Then he flashed up at her a quick look of resentment, a
look which he found himself unable to repress. "While you're all
dolled up," he said with a snort, as though bent on wounding her,
"dolled up like a lobster palace floater!"

It hurt him more than ever to see that he could not even dethrone that
fixed look of pity from her face, that even his abuse could not thrust
aside her composure.

"I 'm not a lobster palace floater," she quietly replied. "And you
know it."

"Then what are you?" he demanded.

"I 'm a confidential agent of the Treasury Department," was her
quiet-toned answer.

"Oho!" cried Blake. "So that's why we 've grown so high and