ery and intrigue were equally a part of life, as indigenous to
the Twentieth Century as to those days long entombed in history when the
troops of Ferdinand and Isabella sat down on the plain before Grenada.

Plot and melodrama were in every life; in some so briefly as hardly to be
recognized, in others--in that of certain men and women in the public
eye, for instance--they were almost in the nature of a continuous
performance.

In these days men took a bath morning and evening, ate daintily, had a
refined vocabulary to use on demand, dressed in tweeds instead of velvet.
There were longer intervals between the old style of warfare when men
were always plugging one another full of holes in the name of religion or
disputed territory, merely to amuse themselves with a tryout of Right
against Might, or to gratify the insane ambition of some upstart like
Napoleon. To-day the business world was the battlefield, and it was his
capital a man was always healing, his poor brain that collapsed nightly
after the strain and nervous worry of the day.

It suddenly felt quite normal to be here flattened against a wall waiting
for some impossible denouement.

Nevertheless, he was sick with apprehension.

Would it merely be the prelude to another drama? Was his life to be a
series of unwritten plays, of which he was both the hero and the
bewildered spectator? Or would it bring him calm, the terrible calm of
stagnation, of an inner life finished, sealed, buried?

It was inevitable in these romantic surroundings and conditions that he
should revert to his almost forgotten jealousy. Suppose Spaulding had
stumbled upon something.... But he had been asked for no such
evidence.... It would be a damnable liberty.... It might be inextricably
woven with the business in hand.... There were other men besides Doremus
whom Helene saw constantly.... Spaulding may have seen his chance to nip
the thing in the bud, and had taken the risk....

He felt the detective's lips at his ear: "Hear anything? Move a little
so's you can look up."

Ruyler heard his wife's voice above him, then Aileen Lawton's. He parted
the branches and saw the two girls lean over the low sill of the
casement. Both had removed their masks, but their faces were only dimly
revealed. Their voices, however, were distinct enough, and his wife's was
dull and flat.

"Oh, I can't," she said. "I can't."

"Well, you'll just jolly well have to. You've got it, haven't you?"

"Oh, yes