declared the Second Deputy.

She sat without speaking, apparently in deep study. Her intent face showed no fear, no bewilderment, no actual emotion of any kind.

"You 've got 'o face it," said Blake, sitting back and waiting for her to speak. His attitude was that of a physician at a bedside, awaiting the prescribed opiate to produce its prescribed effect.

"Will I be dragged into this case, in any way, if Binhart is rounded up?" the woman finally asked.

"Not once," he asserted.

"You promise me that?"

"Of course," answered the Second Deputy.

"And you 'll let me alone on—on the other things?" she calmly exacted.

"Yes," he promptly acknowledged. "I 'll see that you 're let alone."

Again she looked at him with her veiled and judicial eyes. Then she dropped her hands into her lap. The gesture seemed one of resignation.

"Binhart's in Montreal," she said.

Blake, keeping his face well under control, waited for her to go on.

"He 's been in Montreal for weeks now. You 'll find him at 381 King Edward Avenue, in Westmount. He 's there, posing as an expert accountant."

She saw the quick shadow of doubt, the eye-flash of indecision. So she reached quietly down and opened her pocket-book, rummaging through its contents for a moment or two. Then she handed Blake a folded envelope.

"You know his writing?" she asked.

"I 've seen enough of it," he retorted, as he examined the typewritten envelope post-marked "Montreal, Que." Then he drew out the inner sheet. On it, written by pen, he read the message: "Come to 381 King Edward when the coast is clear," and below this the initials "C. B."

Blake, with the writing still before his eyes, opened a desk drawer and took out a large reading-glass. Through the lens of this he again studied the inscription, word by word. Then he turned to the office 'phone on his desk.

"Nolan," he said into the receiver, "I want to know if there 's a King Edward Avenue in Montreal."

He sat there waiting, still regarding the handwriting with stolidly reproving eyes. There was no doubt of its authenticity. He would have known it at a glance.

"Yes, sir," came the answer over the wire. "It's one of the newer avenues in Westmount."

Blake, still wrapped in thought, hung up the receiver. The woman facing him did not seem to resent his possible imputation of dishonesty. To be suspicious of all with whom he came in contact was imposed on him by his profession. He was compelled to watch even his associates, his operatives and underlings, his friends as well as his enemies. Life, with him, was a concerto of skepticisms.

She was able to watch him, without emotion, as he again bent forward, took up the 'phone receiver, and this time spoke apparently to another office.

"I want you to wire Teal to get a man out to cover 381 King Edward Avenue, in Montreal. Yes, Montreal. Tell him to get a man out there inside of an hour, and put a night watch on until I relieve 'em."

Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his desk, wrote a short message on a form pad and pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger. He carefully folded up the piece of paper as he waited.

"Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal right away," he said to the attendant who answered his call. Then he swung about in his chair, with a throaty grunt of content. He sat for a moment, staring at the woman with unseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his hands thrust deep in his pockets he slowly moved his head back and forth, as though assenting to some unuttered question.

"Elsie, you 're all right," he acknowledged with his solemn and unimaginative impassivity. "You 're all right."

Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was a tacit question. He was still a little puzzled by her surrender. He knew she did not regard him as the great man that he was, that his public career had made of him.

"You've helped me out of a hole," he acknowledged as he faced her interrogating eyes with his one-sided smile. "I 'm mighty glad you 've done it, Elsie—for your sake as well as mine."

"What hole?" asked the woman, wearily drawing on her gloves. There was neither open contempt nor indifference on her face. Yet something in her bearing nettled him. The quietness of her question contrasted strangely with the gruffness of the Second Deputy's voice as he answered her.

"Oh, they think I 'm a has-been round here," he snorted. "They 've got the idea I 'm out o' date. And I 'm going to show 'em a thing or two to wake 'em up."

"How?" asked the woman.

"By doing what their whole kid-glove gang have n't been able to do," he avowed. And having delivered himself of that ultimatum, he promptly relaxed into his old-time impassiveness, like a dog snapping from his kennel and shrinking back into its shadows. At the same moment that Blake's thick forefinger again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk end the watching woman could see the relapse into official wariness. It was as though he had put the shutters up in front of his soul. She accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal. She rose from her chair and quietly lowered and adjusted her veil. Yet through that lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail Blake for a moment or two. She looked at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists look at a ruin that has been pointed out to them as historic.

"You did n't give me back Connie Binhart's note," she reminded him as she paused with her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.

"D' you want it?" he queried with simulated indifference, as he made a final and lingering study of it.

"I 'd like to keep it," she acknowledged. When, without meeting her eyes, he handed it over to her, she folded it and restored it to her pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things depended on that small scrap of paper.

Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasons for taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at any time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of caring for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to the time when so much might have depended on its answer.

The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammed it shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or the other. And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph Never-Fail Blake let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that long life which (and of this he was now comfortably conscious) his next official move was about to redeem.

II

It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie" Blake first found himself in any way associated with that arm of constituted authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man, on that occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an armful of evening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerant pickpocket. The fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law was behind him when he was pushed happy and tingling through a transom to release the door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a foreshadowing of that pride which later welled up in his bosom at the phrase that he would always "have United Decency behind him," as the social purifiers fell into the habit of putting it.

At nineteen, as a "checker" at the Upper Kalumet Collieries, Blake had learned to remember faces. Slavic or Magyar, Swedish or Calabrian, from that daily line of over two hundred he could always pick his face and correctly call the name. His post meant a life of indolence and petty authority. His earlier work as a steamfitter had been more profitable. Yet at that work he had been a menial; it involved no transom-born thrills, no street-corner tailer's suspense. As a checker he was at least the master of other men.

His public career had actually begun as a strike breaker. The monotony of