rom Mount Hope.

No unnecessary time was wasted on Montgomery's appearance. A wet towel
in the not too gentle hands of Mr. Gilmore removed the blood stains from
his face, and then he was led forth into the night,--the night which so
completely swallowed up all trace of him that his old woman and her
brood sought his accustomed haunts in vain. Nor was Mr. Moxlow any more
successful in his efforts to discover the handy-man's whereabouts. As
for Mount Hope she saw in the mysterious disappearance of the star
witness only the devious activities of John North's friends.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

FATHER AND SON

While Mr. Gilmore was an exceedingly capable accomplice, at once
resourceful, energetic, unsentimental and conscienceless, he yet
combined with these solid merits, certain characteristics which rendered
uninterrupted intercourse with him a horror and a shame to Marshall
Langham who was daily and almost hourly paying the price the gambler had
set on his silence. And what a price it was! Gilmore was his master,
coarse, brutal, and fiercely exacting. How he hated him, and yet how
necessary he had become; for the gambler never faltered, was never
uncertain; he met each difficulty with a callous readiness which Langham
knew he himself would utterly have lacked. He decided this was because
Gilmore was without imagination, since in his own many fearful, doubting
moments, he saw always what he had come to believe as the inevitable
time when the wicked fabric they were building would collapse like a
house of cards in a gale of wind, and his terrible secret would be
revealed to all men.

All this while, step by step, Gilmore, without haste but without pause,
was moving toward his desires. He came and went in the Langham house as
if he were master there.

When Marshall had first informed Evelyn that he expected to have Mr.
Gilmore in to dinner, there had been a scene, and she had threatened to
appeal to the judge; but he told her fiercely that he would bring home
whom he pleased, that it suited him to be decent to Andy and that was
all there was to it. And apparently she soon found something to like in
this strange intimate of her husband's; at least she had made no protest
after the gambler's first visit to the house.

On his part Gilmore was quickly conscious of the subtle encouragement
she extended him. She understood him, she saw into his soul, she divined
his passion for her and she was not shocked by it. In his unh