g about,
trying to find some adequate motive for this new line of duplicity. He
kept warning himself that she was not to be trusted. Human beings, all
human beings, he had found, moved only by indirection. He was too old
a bird to have sand thrown in his eyes.

"Why, you welched on Binhart yourself. You put me on his track. You
sent me up to Montreal!"

"They made me do that," confessed the unhappy woman. "He was n't in
Montreal. He never had been there!"

"You had a letter from him there, telling you to come to 881 King
Edward when the coast was clear."

"That letter was two years old. It was sent from a room in the King
Edward Hotel. That was part of their plant."

He sat for a long time thinking it over, point by point. He became
disturbed by a sense of instability in the things that had once seemed
most enduring, the sickening cataclysmic horror of a man who finds the
very earth under his feet shaken by its earthquake. His sodden face
appeared to age even as he sat there laboriously reliving the past, the
past that seemed suddenly empty and futile.

"So you sold me out!" he finally said, studying her white face with his
haggard hound's eyes.

"I could n't help it, Jim. You forced it on me. You wouldn't give me
the chance to do anything else. I wanted to help you--but you held me
off. You put the other thing before my friendship!"

"What do _you_ know about friendship?" cried the gray-faced man.

"We were friends once," answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockery
in his cry.

He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There
was something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not
yet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed
dazzled, just as the eye itself may be dazzled by unexpected light.

"So you sold me out!" he said for a third time. He did not move, but
under that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursing
fires which even he himself could not understand.

"Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappy
woman facing him. "You could have saved me--from him, from myself.
But you let the chance slip away. I couldn't go on. I saw where it
would end. So I had to save myself. I had to save myself--in the only
way I could. Oh, Jim, if you 'd only been kinder!"

She sat with her head bowed, ashamed of her tears, the tears which he
could not understand. He stared at her great crown of