of
settlement.

"I had thought, of course, that there would be money, and it was a
bad day when I found out I'd made a mistake. My sister was wild with
disappointment. We were pretty hard up, my sister and I."

I was watching Alison. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, and
she was staring out of the window at the cheerless roof below. She had
set her lips a little, but that was all.

"You understand, of course, that I'm not defending myself," went on the
sullen voice. "The day came when old Harrington put us both out of the
house at the point of a revolver, and I threatened--I suppose you know
that, too--I threatened to kill him.

"My sister and I had hard times after that. We lived on the continent
for a while. I was at Monte Carlo and she was in Italy. She met a young
lady there, the granddaughter of a steel manufacturer and an heiress,
and she sent for me. When I got to Rome the girl was gone. Last winter I
was all in--social secretary to an Englishman, a wholesale grocer with
a new title, but we had a row, and I came home. I went out to the Heaton
boys' ranch in Wyoming, and met Bronson there. He lent me money, and
I've been doing his dirty work ever since."

Sullivan got up then and walked slowly forward and back as he talked,
his eyes on the faded pattern of the office rug.

"If you want to live in hell," he said savagely, "put yourself in
another man's power. Bronson got into trouble, forging John Gilmore's
name to those notes, and in some way he learned that a man was bringing
the papers back to Washington on the Flier. He even learned the number
of his berth, and the night before the wreck, just as I was boarding the
train, I got a telegram."

Hotchkiss stepped forward once more importantly. "Which read, I think:
'Man with papers in lower ten, car seven. Get them.'"

Sullivan looked at the little man with sulky blue eyes.

"It was something like that, anyhow. But it was a nasty business, and it
made matters worse that he didn't care that a telegram which must pass
through a half dozen hands was more or less incriminating to me.

"Then, to add to the unpleasantness of my position, just after we
boarded the train--I was accompanying my sister and this young lady,
Miss West--a woman touched me on the sleeve, and I turned to face--my
wife!

"That took away my last bit of nerve. I told my sister, and you can
understand she was in a bad way, too. We knew what it meant. Ida had
heard that I was g