u are, without leaving that chair, for the
next ten minutes." He moved across the room to the door. "Good-night,
Jason," he said.

"Good-night, Master Jim--good-night, sir--oh, Lord!"

Jimmie Dale did not require that ten minutes; it was a very wide margin
of safety to obviate the possibility of Jason, from a window, detecting
the exit of a disreputable character from the house--in three minutes
he was turning the corner of the first cross street and walking rapidly
away from Riverside Drive.

In the subway station Jimmie Dale read the letter--read it twice over,
as he always read those strange epistles of hers that opened the door to
new peril, new danger to the Gray Seal, but too, that seemed somehow to
draw tighter, in a glad, big way, the unseen bond between them; read it,
as he always read those letters, almost subconsciously committing the
very words to memory with that keen faculty of brain of his. But now
as he began to tear the sheet and envelope into minute particles, a
strained, hard look was on his face and in his eyes, and his lips, half
parted, moved a little.

"It's a death warrant," muttered Jimmie Dale. "I--I guess to-night will
see the end of the Gray Seal. She says I needn't do it, but I guess it's
worth the risk--a human life!"

A downtown express roared into the station.

"What time is it?" Jimmie Dale asked the guard, as he stepped aboard.

"'Bout midnight," the man answered tersely.

The forward car was almost empty, and Jimmie Dale chose a seat by
himself. How did she know? How did she know not only this, but the
hundred other affairs that she had outlined in those letters of hers? By
what means, superhuman, indeed, it seemed, did she--Jimmie Dale jerked
himself erect suddenly. What good did it do to speculate on that now,
when every minute was priceless? What was HE to do, how was he to act,
what plan could he formulate and carry out, and WIN against odds that,
at the outset, were desperate enough even to forecast almost certain
failure--and death!

Who would ever have suspected old Tom Ludgate, known for years
throughout the squalour of the East Side as old Luddy, the pushcart man,
of having a bag of unset diamonds under his pillow--or under the sack,
rather, that he probably used for a pillow! What a queer thing to do!
But then, old Luddy was a character--apparently always in the most
poverty-stricken condition, apparently hardly more than keeping body
and soul together, trusting no