f his sort
should take his life under the circumstances I feel, somehow, that there
is a part of the story even I do not know. But let that be."

He bowed his head in his hands.

"Ever since I came into this room," he went on, "the eyes of a pompous
little man have been following me about. They have constantly recalled
to me the nightmare of my life. You have noticed, no doubt, the pictures
of the admiral that decorate these walls?"

"I have," replied Magee. He gazed curiously at the nearest of the
portraits. How persistently this almost mythical starched man wove in
and out of the melodrama at Baldpate Inn.

"Well," continued Kendrick, "the admiral's eyes haunt me. Perhaps you
know that he plays a game--a game of solitaire. I have good reason to
remember that game. It is a silly inconsequential game. You would
scarcely believe that it once sent a man to hell."

He stopped.

"I am beginning in the middle of my story," he apologized. "Let me go
back. Six years ago I was hardly the man you see now--I was at least
twenty years younger. Hayden and I worked together in the office of the
Suburban Railway. We had been close friends at college--I believed in
him and trusted him, although I knew he had certain weaknesses. I was a
happy man. I had risen rapidly, I was young, the future was lying golden
before me--and I was engaged. The daughter of Henry Thornhill, our
employer--the girl you have met here at Baldpate--had promised to be my
wife. Hayden had also been a suitor, but when our engagement was
announced he came to me like a man, and I thought his words were
sincere.

"One day Hayden told me of a chance we might take which would make us
rich. It was not--altogether within the law. But it was the sort of
thing that other men were doing constantly, and Hayden assured me that
as he had arranged matters it was absolutely safe. My great sin is that
I agreed we should take the chance--a sin for which I have paid, Mr.
Magee, over and over."

Again he paused, and gazed steadily at the fire. Again Magee noted the
gray at his temples, the aftermath of fevers in his cheeks.

"We--took the chance," he went on. "For a time everything went well.
Then--one blustering March night--Hayden came to me and told me we were
certain to be caught. Some of his plans had gone awry. I trusted him
fully at the time, you understand--he was the man with whom I had sat on
the window-seat of my room at college, settling the question of
immor