ures I saw
were purely mental. I haven't been to your art gallery yet."

"See it by all means!" he urged with exaggerated politeness. "It's a
rare privilege, you know. It's not often the rabble is inside these
walls. It's the chance of your life."

"Thank you, I'll find enough to amuse me before I go."

Again the doctor smiled.

Bivens turned on his heels with a muttered oath and disappeared in the
crowd. He was plainly disconcerted by his enemy's manner. To see a man
of his temperament rise suddenly from the depths of despair into
smiling serenity was something uncanny. He left him deliberating
whether to call his servants and throw him into the street.

As the doctor waited for the music to begin, he watched the women pass,
resplendent in their jewels and magnificent in their nakedness.
To-night he saw it without the excuses of conventional social usage.

"And this," he exclaimed bitterly, "is the highest development of
American life; this splendid, sordid, criminal degrading pageant with
its sensual appeal; and yet if the house should fall and crush them
all, the world would lose nothing of value except the jewelry that
might be mixed with its debris!"

He felt for the moment a messenger of divine vengeance. His pistol shot
would at least give them something to think about.

The music began, and the dancers once more whirled into the centre of
the room and the crowd filled the space under the grand arch which led
into the hall. Bivens was the centre of an admiring group of sycophants
and worshipful snobs. The doctor's heart gave a mad throb of joy. His
hour had come.

With quick strides he covered the space which separated them and
without a moment's hesitation thrust his hand into his breast for his
revolver. Not a muscle or nerve quivered. His finger touched the
trigger softly and he gave Bivens a look which he meant he should take
with him into eternity, when just beyond him he saw Harriet. She stood
motionless with a look of mute agony on her fair young face, watching
Stuart talk to Bivens's wife.

His finger slipped from the trigger and his hand loosed its deadly
grip.

"Have I forgotten my baby!" he cried in sudden anguish. And then
another vision flashed through his excited brain. A court room, a
prisoner, his own bowed figure the centre of a thousand eyes while the
jury brought in their verdict. A moment of awful silence and the
foreman said:

"Guilty of murder in the first degree."

And the