ps approach. A
dozen times she went to her windows and wildly gazed out on the storm.
As she stared, she prayed. It was the same prayer, over and over.

"Dear God, please don't let it be that way!" The aspiration was the
nearest she dared come to putting into words the terror that shook her
heart.

The second fifteen minutes were almost up when she really heard the
elevator stop. Quick footsteps approached her door, but there were no
voices. The three men, if they were coming, were coming in utter
silence. Before they had time to rap she had opened the door and stood
back to let them enter. As they passed her she looked into their faces,
and as she looked the familiar sense of panic, now immeasurably
intensified, again seized her in its grip.

Laurie, usually the most punctilious of men, made on this occasion an
omission extraordinary for him. He did not present his partners to their
hostess. But not one of the three noticed that omission. Rodney Bangs,
pale but carrying himself with a palpable effort at control, shouldered
his way into the room in his characteristic fashion, as if he were
meeting and hurling back a foot-ball rush. Epstein, breathless and
obviously greatly excited, actually stumbled over the threshold in his
unseeing haste. Laurie, slowly following the two, alone wore some
resemblance to a normal manner. He was very serious but quite calm.

He took off his coat, methodically folded it, and laid it on a near-by
chair. To the brain back of each of the three pairs of eyes watching
him, the same thought came. He had something appalling to tell them,
and, cool as he seemed, he dared not tell it. He was playing for time.
The strain of even the brief delay was too much for Epstein's
endurance. High-strung, his nerves on edge, almost before Laurie had
turned he sputtered forth questions like bullets from a machine-gun.

"Vell! vell!" he demanded, "vot's it all about? Vot's it mean? Over the
telephone you say you got to see us this minute. You say you got into
trouble, big trouble. Vell, vot trouble? Vot is it?"

Laurie looked at him, and something in the look almost spiked the big
gun. But Epstein was a man of action, and, notwithstanding his
nervousness, a man of some nerve. The expression in the boy's black eyes
had stunned him, but with only an instant's hesitation he finished what
he had meant to say.

"I guess it ain't nothing ve can't fix up," he jerked out, trying to
speak with his usual assuranc