custom, and drove his body back into the cushioned seat.

"Where to, sir?" said Harkness, turning.

"Anywhere," he answered gruffly, and, thwarted in his desire, he said to himself furiously: "That woman always opposes me! I must teach her a lesson. I won't go at all."

But at the end of a moment he pulled out his watch impatiently and calculated the time.

"Home," he said suddenly.

At the house, he ran rapidly through the opening doors and up the stairs to his bedroom, where he unlocked a little safe fixed in the wall behind a tapestry that hid it, and took out a tray of rings. Sorting them quickly, with a low, cynical chuckle, he selected a magnificent ruby, slipped it into his pocket, closed the safe, and passed out of the house with the same rapidity with which he had entered.

"Mrs. Kildair's, Harkness," he said. "Drive so as to get me there at five-fifteen."

"Now we shall see," he said to himself, with a smile, gazing at the ring in the palm of his hand with a man's contemptuous contemplation of the stone which could hold such fascination over a woman's soul. For him it was absolutely necessary, as a first step toward his conquest of all his enemies, to feel his power over this one present resistance.

The idea that had come into his head restored his good humor and aroused in him a certain joy of energy. He had forgot momentarily his errand, absorbed in his own battle for existence.

"Today is Thursday," he said, with renewed energy. "Next Wednesday will be the crisis. I must find out what Majendie is going to do. Snelling's the man to know—or Garraboy."

The car stopped. He sprang out and, without giving his name, entered the elevator. At the apartment a Japanese servant took his things and ushered him into the low-lit greens of the studio, which ran the height of the two floors that formed the duplex apartment.

Mrs. Rita Kildair was stretched on a low Récamier sofa, watching him with amused eyes as he entered with that atmosphere of strife and fury that seemed always to play about him. She waited until he had come to her side before she raised her hand to his, in a gesture that had no animation, saying:

"How do you do?"

Something in the tranquil, amused self-possession of her pose made him stupidly repeat the question. Then, forgetting his resolve to show no impatience, he said impetuously:

"Why did you keep me waiting?"

"Because I did not wish to see your highness then."

"Not dressed?"

"No, I was simply amusing myself with a very nice boy."

"Who?"

She smiled, and, without heed to his question, motioned him to a chair with a little gesture, not of her arm, but of her fingers, on which she wore several rings of unusual luster. She had, as a woman, that same magnetic self-consciousness that distinguishes the great actress, aware that every eye is focused on her and that the slightest change of her hand or shift of her head has an instantaneous importance.

Slade obeyed her with a sudden sense of warm content.

"Smoke?" he said, taking out a cigar. "Permission?"

He helped himself to a match, sunk himself in the great chair, crossed his legs, and looked at her.

Rita Kildair gave that complex appearance of a woman much younger than she seemed, or of a woman much older. She was at that mental phase in her life when she exhaled to the fullest that perfume of mystery which is the most feminine and irresistible of all the powers that a woman exerts over the masculine imagination, if indeed it is not the sum of all seductions. The inexplicable in her own life and individuality was heightened in every way by the subservience of outward things, whether by calculation or by an instinctive sense of interpretation.

The great studio, to the neglect of the electric chandelier, was lit by half a dozen candles, which flung about conflicting eddies of wavering lights and shadows. In farther corners were a divan, a piano, a portrait on an easel, lounges, waiting like so many shadows to be called forth. A standing lamp, not too near, bathed the couch on which she lay with a softened luster. Her tea-gown of liberty silk, with tones that changed and mingled with each other, was of the purple of the grape, an effect produced, too, by the superimposition of one filmy garment on the other. A slippered foot and ankle came forth from the fragrant disorder of the skirt, either by studied arrangement or by the impulse of a woman who is confident of all her poses. Her nose, quite the most individual feature, was aquiline, yet not such as is associated with a masculine character. Rather, it was vitally sensitive, and gave, in conjunction with the intent and instantaneous aspect of her grayish eyes, the instinctive, almost savage appetite for possession and sensation that is characteristic of her sex. No one looked at her without asking himself a question. Those who believed her under thirty wondered at the experiences that must have crowded in upon her. Those who believed her nearer forty still marveled at her mastery over youth. Those of an analytical mind left her always with a feeling of speculation framed in two questions—whence had she come and where would she end?

It was this latter speculation more than any other that absorbed Slade, irresistibly intrigued by the elusiveness of a fascination which he could not analyze. She endured his fixed glance without annoyance, absorbed, too, in the thoughts which his entrance had brought her. Finally, adapting her manner to his, she said with his own abruptness:

"Well, what do you want to say to me?"

"I'm wondering what you are after in this life, pretty lady?" he said directly.

"What do you want?"

"Power."

"Not to be bored."

They smiled by common consent.

"And now we know no more than we did before," he said.

She stretched out her slender hand against the purple folds of her gown, and her eyes lingered on the jewels that she held caressingly before them—a look that did not escape the man.

"By thunder, you're the strangest thing I've run into," he said, shifting his legs.

"On each of the eight times we have been alone," she said, smiling, "you have made precisely that same discovery. Did you forget?"

"I'd like to know something about you," he said.

"How old I am—about my husband—what I am doing here—am I rich—what's my past—and so on. Consider all these questions asked and refused—for the ninth time. And now, what—why did you come here?"

He put aside his cigar impatiently, propelled himself to his feet, and came forward until his knee touched the couch. She looked up, pleasantly aware of so much brute strength held in leash above her.

"Sit down."

And, as he remained standing, she took a little electric button attached to a coil that was on the couch, and pressed it. In the hall outside a buzz was heard, and then the soft, sliding step of