class="pindent">“What is it?” she asked, in her mellow English contralto.

“I don’t exactly know,” he answered, with his hand before his eyes. “I wish you’d tell me.”

She came and sat down in a chair before him, pushing back her tumbled hair with one hand, seeming to be measuring him with her intent gaze. She appeared in some way not altogether dissatisfied with him; it seemed almost as if she had taken his face between her two hands, and read it, feature by feature.

“I hardly know where to begin,” she hesitated. “I mean, I don’t know how much they’ve explained to you already. Indeed, there’s a great deal I don’t understand myself. But, of course, you know that we have tapped Penfield’s private wire.”

He nodded an assenting head toward the little brass sounder.

“And, of course, you are able to judge why. He gets all the race returns at the club house, and then sends them on by private ’phone to his other two pool-rooms. He has to do it that way, now that New York is not so open, and ever since the Postal-Union directors pretended to cut out their sporting service.”

Durkin knew all this, but he waited for the sake of hearing her voice and watching the play of her features.

“Every track report, you know, comes into New York by way of the race department of the Postal-Union on lower Broadway. There, messenger boys hurry about with the reports to the different wire-operators, who wire the returns to the company’s different subscribers. Penfield, of course, is really one of them, though it’s not generally known.”

“And always most astutely denied,” scoffed Durkin.

“Many things are astutely denied, nowadays, when a great deal of money comes out of them,” she said, wearily.

“But what have you and I to do with all this?” he broke in.

“Quite enough! You see, there’s a delay of fifteen minutes, naturally, in getting a result to the pool-rooms. That gives us our chance; so, we hold up the message here, ’phone it at once over to MacNutt’s rooms, three doors from Penfield’s, and, when he has had time to drop in, as it were, and place his money, we send through our intercepted message.”

“Then Penfield has no idea who or what MacNutt is?”

“He knows him only as a real estate agent with a passion for plunging, a great deal of money, and—and—” The girl shrugged a rounded shoulder, flushed a little, and did not finish.

“And you know him as—?” suggested Durkin.

“That lies outside the area of essential information,” she answered, with her first show of animation.

“But you?” Durkin persisted. She met his eyes, but she refused to deal with his cross-questioning. He was still waiting for that betraying sign which was to conjure away the enigma. Yet he rejoiced, inwardly, at the thought that it had not come.

“Both you and I shall have to drop in, on certain days, and do what we can at Penfield’s lower house, while Mackenzie is doing the Madison Avenue place. We’ve been going there, on and off, for weeks now, getting ready for—for this!”

“Then MacNutt’s been working on this scheme for a long while?”

“Yes, this house has been rented by the month, furnished, just as you see it, simply because it stood in about the right place. We have even lost a few hundred dollars, altogether, in Penfield’s different places. But, in the end, the three of us are to hit Penfield together, on a ragged field, when there’s a chance for heavy odds. But, of course, we can do it only once!”

“And then what?” asked Durkin.

Again the girl shrugged a shoulder.

“Penfield’s patrons are all wealthy men,” she went on, in a sort of pedagogic explicitness. “The betting, particularly at the upper house, is always very heavy. A book of a hundred thousand dollars is common enough; sometimes it goes up to two or three hundred thousand. So, you see, it all depends on our odds. MacNutt himself hopes to make at least a hundred thousand. But then he has worked and brooded over it all so long, I don’t think he sees things quite clearly now!”

It was her first shadow of reflection on their chief, and Durkin caught up the cue.

“He seems sharp enough still, to leave you and me here, to take all the risk in a raid,” he protested.

“Yes,” she assented, with the touch of weariness that came into her voice at times. “He is shrewd and sharp—shrewder and sharper than you would dare believe.”

“And of course you understand your risk, now, here, from this moment on?”

“Yes, I quite understand it,” she answered, with unbetraying evenness of voice.

His fingers were toying nervously with a little magnetic “wire finder.”

“How in heavens did you ever get mixed up with—with—in this sort of thing?” Durkin at last demanded, exasperated into the immediate question. He turned on her quickly, as he asked it, and the eyes of the two met, combatively, for a moment or two. It was the girl who at last looked away.

“How did you?” she asked, quietly enough. She was strangely unlike any woman bookie he had seen or heard of before.

“Oh, me,—I’m different!” he cried, deprecatively. For some subtle reason she went pale, and then flushed hot again.

“You’re—you’re not MacNutt’s wife?” he asked her, almost hopelessly.

She moved her head from side to side, slowly, in dissent, and got up and went to the window, where she gazed out over the house-tops at the paling afternoon.

“No, I’m not his wife,” she said, in her quiet contralto.

“Then why won’t you tell me how you got mixed up in this sort of thing?”

“It’s all so silly and so commonplace,” she said, without turning to look at him.

“Yes?” he said, and waited.

She wheeled about and wrung out with a sudden passionate “Oh, what’s the good of all this! I am here tapping wires, and you are here doing the same. Neither of us belongs at this sort of work, but—but, we’re here!”

“Can’t you tell me?” he asked, more gently, yet inwardly more dogged.

“Yes, I shall tell you,” she answered him, at last. “It began, really, six years ago when my mother died, in London, and my father went to pieces, went pitifully to pieces, and had to give up his profession as a barrister. I felt sorry for him, and stayed with him, through his months of drunkenness, and his gradual downfall. He started a little office for genealogical research—as we called it—digging up pretentious alliances, and suitable ancestors for idle and wealthy nobodies. This was bad enough, but little by little it degenerated into a sort of next-of-kin agency, and wrung its money from the poor, instead of the rich!”

She paused for a moment, before she went on, gazing at the man before her in grim and terrible candor, steeled with the purpose to purge her soul of all she had to say, and have it over and done with.

“But I stayed with father, through it all. I told myself I could live it down, the squalor, and the meanness, and the deceits, and even the drunkenness—I stayed with him because I pitied him. Even then he was a brilliant man. And I would have worked and fought for him to the end,