said. "I'm dead serious, Pinto. Bring fifty!"

"But how can I get it?" demanded the other frantically.

"Get it," said the colonel. "It is highly probable that it will be of no
use to any of us. Let us at least have the illusion of being well off."

* * * * *

In greater leisure than either of her three companions in crime were
exhibiting, Lollie Marsh was preparing to take her departure to New
York. She was packing at leisure in her cosy flat on Tavistock Avenue,
stopping now and again to consider the problem of the superfluous
article of clothing--a problem which presents itself to all packers.

Between whiles she arrested her labours to think of something else.
Kneeling down by the side of her trunk, she would give herself up to
long reveries, which ended in a sigh and the resumption of her packing.

By the commonly accepted standards of civilisation she was a wicked
woman, but there are degrees of wickedness. She had searched her mind to
recall all the qualms she had felt in her long association with the
Boundary Gang, and took an unusual pleasure in her strange recollection.
She remembered when she had refused to be drawn into the Crotin fraud;
she recalled her stormy interview with the colonel when she declined to
take a part in the ruining of young Debenham.

But mostly she was glad that she had never gone any farther to carry out
the colonel's instructions in regard to Stafford King. Not that she
would have succeeded, she told herself with a little smile, but she was
glad she had never seriously tried. Her mind switched to Crewe and
switched back again. Crewe's was the one face she did not wish to see,
the one member of the gang that she put aside from the others and
wilfully veiled. Crewe had always been kind to her, always courteous,
her champion in all bad times, and yet had never made love to her. She
wondered what had brought him down to his present level, and why a man
possessed of education, and who at one time, as she knew, had been an
officer in a crack regiment, should have fallen so readily under
Boundary's influence.

She made a little face and went on with her packing. She did not want to
think about Crewe for obvious reasons. Yet, as he had said---- But he
hadn't said, she told herself. Very likely he was married, though that
fact did not greatly trouble the girl. Such men as these have always a
good as well as a bad past, pleasant as well as bitter memories,