the shutters up in front of his soul. She
accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her
chair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that
lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or
two. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists
look at a ruin that has been pointed out to them as historic.

"You did n't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him as
she paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.

"D' you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made a
final and lingering study of it.

"I 'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting her
eyes, he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to her
pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that small
scrap of paper.

Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely
disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasons
for taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at
any time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of
caring for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to the
time when so much might have depended on its answer.

The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammed
it shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or the
other. And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph
Never-Fail Blake let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that long
life which (and of this he was now comfortably conscious) his next
official move was about to redeem.

II

It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie"
Blake first found himself in any way associated with that arm of
constituted authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man,
on that occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an
armful of evening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerant
pickpocket. The fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law
was behind him when he was pushed happy and tingling through a transom
to release the door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a
foreshadowing of that pride which later welled up in his bosom at the
phrase that he would always "have United Decency behind him," as the
social purifiers fell into the habit of putting it.

At nineteen, as a "checker" at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake had
learned to r