a
word of advice?"

"By all means."

"Have you told Max of your relations with Sara Law?"

"No."

"Or anybody else?"

"No."

"Then keep the truth to yourself--at least until this coil is
straightened out."

Ember got up. "Good night," he said pleasantly.

Whitaker took his hand, staring. "Good night," he echoed blankly.
"But--I say--why keep it quiet?"

Ember, turning to go, paused, his glance quietly quizzical. "You don't
mean to claim your wife?"

"On the contrary, I expect to offer no defence to her action for
divorce."

"Grounds of desertion?"

"I presume so."

"Just the same, keep it as quiet as possible until the divorce is
granted. If you live till then ... you may possibly continue to live
thereafter."

IX

ENTR'ACTE

Dawn of Sunday found Whitaker still awake. Alone in his uncheerful hotel
bedchamber, his chair tilted back against the wall, he sat smoking and
thinking, reviewing again and again every consideration growing out of
his matrimonial entanglement.

He turned in at length to the dreamless slumbers of mental exhaustion.

The morning introduced him to a world of newspapers gone mad and
garrulous with accounts of the sensation of the preceding night. What
they told him only confirmed the history of his wife's career as
detailed by the gratuitous Mr. Ember. There was, however, no suggestion
in any report that Drummond had not in fact committed suicide--this,
despite the total disappearance of the hypothetical corpse. No doubts
seemed to have arisen from the circumstance that there had been,
apparently, but a single witness of the _felo de se_. A man, breathless
with excitement, had run up to the nearest policeman with word of what
he claimed to have seen. In the subsequent confusion he had vanished.
And so thoroughly, it seemed, had the mind of New York been prepared for
some fatal accident to this latest lover of Sara Law that no one dreamed
of questioning the authenticity of the report.

Several sensational sheets ran exhaustive resumes, elaborately
illustrated, of the public life of "The Destroying Angel."

Some remarked the fact that little or nothing was known of the history
of Sara Law prior to her appearance, under the management of Jules Max,
as _Joan Thursday_.

Whitaker learned that she had refused herself to the reporters who
besieged her residence.

It seemed to be an unanimous assumption that the news of Drummond's
suicide had in some manner been conve