one, and obsessed by the dread that by
depositing in a bank some one would discover that he had money, and
attempt to force it from him, he had put his savings, year after
year, for twenty years, twenty-five years, perhaps, into unset
stone--diamonds. How had she found that out?

Jimmie Dale sank into a deeper reverie. He could steal them all right,
and they would be well worth the stealing--old Luddy had done well, and
lived and existed on next to nothing--the stones, she said, were worth
about fifteen thousand dollars. Not so bad, even for twenty-five years
of vegetable selling from a pushcart! He could steal them all right; it
would tax the Gray Seal's ingenuity little to do so simple a thing as
that, but that was not all, nor, indeed, hardly a factor in it--it was
vital that if he were to succeed at all he must steal them PUBLICLY, as
it were.

And after that--WHAT? His own chances were pretty slim at best. Jimmie
Dale, staring at the grayness of the subway wall through the window,
shook his head slowly--then, with a queer little philosophical shrug of
his shoulders, he smiled gravely, seriously. It was all a part of the
game, all a part of the life--of the Gray Seal!

It was half-past twelve, or a little later, as nearly as he could judge,
for Larry the Bat carried no such ornate thing in evidence as a watch,
as he halted at the corner of a dark, squalid street in the lower
East Side. It was a miserable locality--in daylight humming with a
cosmopolitan hive of pitiful humans dragging out as best they could
an intolerable existence, a locality peopled with every nationality on
earth, their community of interest the struggle to maintain life at the
lowest possible expenditure, where necessity even was pared and
shaved down to a minimum; but now, at night time, or rather in the
early-morning hours, the darkness, in very mercy, it seemed, covered it
with a veil, as it were, and in the quiet that hung over it now hid the
bald, the hideous, aye, and the piteous, too, from view.

It was a narrow street, and the row of tenement houses, each house
almost identical with its neighbour, that flanked the pavement on either
side, seemed, from where Jimmie Dale stood looking down its length, from
the corner, to converge together at a point a little way beyond,
giving it an unreal, ominous, cavernlike effect. And, too, there seemed
something ominous even in its quiet. It was as though one sensed acutely
the crouching of some