forestall and provide
for any possible contingency? He hesitated again for a moment, thinking,
then slowly closed the inner door of the safe, locked it, swung the
outer door shut--and, in the act of twirling the knobs, sprang suddenly
to his feet. Sharp, shrill in the stillness of the room, the telephone
bell on the desk rang out clamourously.

Jimmie Dale's face set hard, as he leaped out from behind the
curtain--had Jason heard it! It rang again before he could reach the
desk--was ringing as he snatched the receiver from the hook.

"Yes, yes!" he called, in a low, guarded, hasty way, into the
mouthpiece. "Hello! What is it?" And then one hand, resting on the desk,
closed around the edge, and tightened until the skin over the knuckles
grew ivory white. It was--SHE! She! It was HER voice--he had only heard
it once in all his life--that night, two nights before, in a silvery
laugh from the limousine as it had sped away from him down the road--but
he knew! It thrilled him now with a mad rhapsody, robbing him for the
moment of every thought save that she was living, real, existent--that
it was HER voice. "It's you--YOU!" he said hoarsely.

"Oh, Jimmie--you at last!"--it came in a little gasping cry of relief.
"The letter--"

"Yes, I've got it--it's all right--it's all right"--the words would
not seem to come fast enough in his desperate haste. "But it's you now.
Listen! Listen!" he pleaded. "Tell me who you are! My God! how I've
tried to find you, and--"

That rippling, silvery laugh again, but now, too, it seemed to his eager
ear, with just the faintest note of wistfulness in it.

"Some day, Jimmie. That letter now. It--"

Jimmie Dale straightened up suddenly--Jason's steps, running, sounded
outside the room along the corridor--there was not an instant to lose.

"Hang up! Good-bye! Danger! Don't ring again!" he whispered hurriedly,
and, with a miserable smile, replacing the receiver bitterly on the
hook, he jumped for the curtain.

He reached it none too soon. The door opened, an electric-light switch
clicked, and the room was flooded with light. Jason, still running,
headed for the desk.

"It'll be her again!" Jimmie Dale heard the old man mutter, as from the
edge of the portiere he watched the other's actions.

Jason picked up the telephone.

"Hello! Hello!" he called--then began to click impatiently with the
receiver hook. "Hello! . . . Who? . . . Central? . . . I don't want
any number--somebody was cal