es of a poolroom key-operator. He recalled his chance
meeting with MacNutt, the wire-tapper, and their partnership of
privateer forces in that strange campaign against Penfield, the alert
and opulent poolroom king, who had seemed always able to defy the
efforts and offices of a combative and equally alert district-attorney.

Most vividly and minutely of all, he reviewed his first meeting with
Frances Candler, and the bewilderment that had filled him when he
discovered her to be an intimate and yet a reluctant associate with
MacNutt in his work--a bewilderment which lasted until he himself grew
to realize how easy was the downward trend when once the first false
step had been made.

He brought back to mind their strange adventures and perils and escapes
together, day by day and week by week, their early interest that had
ripened into affection, their innate hatred of that underground life,
which eventually flowered into open revolt and flight, their impetuous
marriage, their precipitate journey from the shores of America.

Then came to him what seemed the bitterest memories of all. It was the
thought of that first too fragile happiness which slowly but implacably
merged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but none the less
evident. That interregnum of peace had been a Tantalus-like taste of a
draught which he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet, point by
point, he recalled their first quiet and hopeful weeks in England, when
their old ways of life seemed as far away as the America they had left
behind, when they still had unbounded faith in themselves and in the
future. Just how or where fell the first corroding touch he could
never tell. But in each of them there had grown up a secret unrest--it
was, he knew, the hounds of habit whimpering from their kennels. "No
one was ever reformed," he had once confided to Frances, "by simply
being turned out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drug
their first rising doubts with the tumult of incessant travel and
change. His wife had lured him to secluded places, she had struggled
to interest him in a language or two, she had planned quixotic courses
of reading--as though a man such as he might be remolded by a few
months of modern authors!--and carried him off to centres of gaiety--as
though the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drive
that inmost fever out of his blood!

He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics, with their br