fixed suddenly and curiously on a woman's form hurrying down the street.
She had turned the corner before he took his eyes from her, and the
match between his fingers had gone out. Not that there was anything very
strange in a woman walking, or even half running, along the street; nor
that there was anything particularly attractive or unusual about
her, and if there had been the street was too dark for him to have
distinguished it. It was not that--it was the fact that she had neither
passed by the house on whose steps he stood, nor come out of any of the
adjoining houses. It was as though she had suddenly and miraculously
appeared out of thin air, and taken form on a sidewalk a little way down
from Marlianne's.

"That's queer!" commented Jimmie Dale to himself. "However--" He took
out another match, lighted his cigarette, jerked the match stub away
from him, and, with a lift of his shoulders, went down the steps.

He crossed the pavement, walked around the front of his machine, since
the steering wheel was on the side next to the curb, and, with his hand
out to open the car door--stopped. Some one had been tampering with
it--it was not quite closed. There was no mistake. Jimmie Dale made
no mistakes of that kind, a man whose life hung a dozen times a day on
little things could not afford to make them. He had closed it firmly,
even with a bang, when he had got out.

Instantly suspicious, he wrenched the door wide open, switched on
the light under the hood, and, with a sharp exclamation, bent quickly
forward. A glove, a woman's glove, a white glove lay on the floor of the
car. Jimmie Dale's pulse leaped suddenly into fierce, pounding beats. It
was HERS! He KNEW that intuitively--knew it as he knew that he breathed.
And that woman he had so leisurely watched as she had disappeared from
sight was, must have been--she!

He sprang from the car with a jump, his first impulse to dash after
her--and checked himself, laughing a little bitterly. It was too late
for that now--he had already let his chance slip through his fingers.
Around the corner was Sixth Avenue, surface cars, the elevated,
taxicabs, a multitude of people, any one of a hundred ways in which
she could, and would, already have discounted pursuit from him--and,
besides, he would not even have been able to recognise her if he saw
her!

Jimmie Dale's smile was mirthless as he turned back to the car, and
picked up the glove. Why had she dropped it there? It coul