he had his chance and missed it. We will assume him to
be peculiarly stupid; we will say that he had opportunity for the second
time--and again failed to grasp her. Can you think that, deliberately
led up to his third opportunity of becoming a lawyer, A will turn his
back for the third time?"

"Certainly," said Johnson Boller, without thought and solely because
Anthony's precise driveling interested him a little more than the affair
of the ring.

"Pah!" Mr. Fry said angrily.

Just here Mr. Horrigan slipped while making his --nth jab at the
Tornado's nose--slipped and fell upon the Tornado's fist and thereafter
reeled about for a few seconds. Johnson Boller emitted his first real
laugh of the evening; Anthony Fry, who had not seen the incident, failed
even to smile.

"It would be interesting," he said crisply, "to select a subject,
Johnson, and try the experiment."

"What experiment?"

"That of learning just how many times opportunity must be presented to
the average individual to secure full recognition of her presence and
her beauties."

"Wouldn't it?" mused Johnson Boller absently.

"I mean, to reach haphazard into the six millions that go to make up New
York, to pick just one individual and segregate him, and then show
him--_opportunity_! To take him aside, where there is nothing else to
distract him, and thrust opportunity in his very face--the opportunity,
whatever it might be, that he has always desired. It seems to me,
Johnson, that watching that experiment might be distinctly worth while!"

"Aha!" yawned Johnson Boller.

"So, therefore," Anthony said placidly, "we will find our subject and
make the experiment."

This time, and with a considerable jar, Johnson Boller awoke to the fact
that danger was at his elbow!

He sat bolt upright and stared at Anthony Fry, and in the queerest way
his flesh crawled for a moment and his hands turned cold, for he knew
that expression of Anthony's all too well. Intent, wholly absorbed, that
expression indicated that, however ridiculous the proposition might be,
its fangs had fastened in Anthony's very soul!

This was the expression which recalled--oh, so clearly--the dread time
when Anthony Fry had become obsessed with the idea that crime is a
matter of diet and external impression, when he had secured the two
yeggmen and established them where he could watch and feed them; when,
eventually, he had been forced to pay for their crowning crime or go to
jail as an