thout doing the things we ought not to do--then we'll
simply _have to be criminals_. But I want my share of the joy of
living--I want my happiness! I want _you_! I lost you once, and
almost forever, by hoping it could be the other way--but it's too late!"

"Frank!" he pleaded.

"I want you to see where we are," she said, with slow and terrible
solemnity. "If I am to be saved from it, now, or ever again, _you_
must do it--_you--you_!"

She drew herself together, with a little shiver.

"Come," she said, "we've got our work to do!"

He looked at her white face for one moment, in silence, bewildered, and
then he snapped shut the button.

"We had better look through the safe at once," she went on
apathetically. Something in her tone, if not her words themselves, as
she had spoken, sent a wave of what was more than startled misery
through her husband. He once more felt, although he felt it vaguely,
the note of impending tragedy which she was so premonitarily sounding.
It brought to him a dim and hurried vision of that far-off but
inevitable catastrophe which lay, somewhere, at the end of the road
they were traveling. Their only hope and solace, it seemed to him,
must thereafter lie in feverish and sustained activity. They must lose
themselves in the dash and whirl of daring moments. And it was not
from pleasure or from choice, now; it was to live. They must act or
perish; they must plot and counterplot, or be submerged. Yet he would
do what he could to save himself, as she, in turn, must do what she
could for herself--if they came to the end of their rope.

A minute later they were bending together over the contents of the
dismantled safe. He was striking matches. By this time they were both
on their knees.

"You run through these papers, while I see what can be done with the
despatch box," he whispered to her. Then he put the little package of
vestas between them, so they might work by their own light. From time
to time the soft spurt of the lighting match broke the silence, as
Frank hurriedly ran her eye over the different packets, and as
hurriedly flung them back into the safe.

It was a relief to Durkin to think that he at least had someone beside
him who could read French. Busy as he was, he incongruously recalled
to his mind how he once used to study the little printed announcements
in his hotel rooms, wondering, ruefully, if the delphic text meant that
lights and fires were extra, and if bath