se where lower Broadway flaunted its
Semitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courts
building in Centre street.

Once there, he made his way to the office of the district-attorney. As
he thoughtfully waited for admission into that democratized court of
last appeal there passed through his mind the dangers and the chances
that lay before him. The situation had its menaces, both obvious and
unforeseen, but the more he thought it over the more he realized that
the emergency called for action, at once decisive and immediate. He
had already bungled and hesitated and misjudged. Blind feeling had
warped his judgment. Until then he had blocked out his path of action
only crudely; there had been little time for the weighing of
consequences and the anticipation of contingencies. He had acted
quickly and blindly. He had both succeeded and been defeated.

Still again the actual peril hanging over his wife came home to him.
In the dust and tumult of battle, and in the black depths of the
jealous vapors that had so blinded and sickened him, he had for the
moment forgotten just what she meant to him, just how handicapped and
helpless he stood without her.

If the thought of their separation touched him, because of more
emotional reasons, it was already too early in his mood of reaction to
admit it to his own shamefaced inner self. Yet he felt, now, that
through it all she was true gold. It was only when the tie stood most
strained and tortured that the sense of its actual strength came home
to him.

As these thoughts and feelings swept disjointedly through his busy head
word was sent out to him that he might see the district-attorney.

The office he stepped into was curtain-draped and carpeted, and hung
with framed portraits, and strewn with heavy and comfortable-looking
leather arm-chairs. Durkin had expected it to look like an
iron-grilled precinct police-station, and he was a little startled by
the sense of luxury and well-being pervading the place.

Tilted momentarily back in a leather chair, behind a high-backed
hardwood desk, the visitor caught a glimpse of one of those nervously
alert, youngish-old figures which always seemed to him so typically
American.

The man behind the high-backed desk paused in his task of checking a
list of typewritten names, and motioned Durkin to a seat. The visitor
could see that he was with an official who would countenance no
profligate waste of time. So he plu