his command he
had called into play in an effort to solve the mystery. For nearly the
entire month, following first this lead and then that, he had lived in
the one disguise that he felt confident she knew nothing of--that was,
or, rather, had become, almost a dual personality with him. From the
Sanctuary, that miserable and disreputable room in a tenement on the
East Side, a tenement that had three separate means of entrance and
exit, he had emerged day after day as Larry the Bat, a character as well
known and as well liked in the exclusive circles of the underworld as
was Jimmie Dale in the most exclusive strata of New York's society
and fashion. And it had been useless--all useless. Through his own
endeavours, through the help of his friends of the underworld, the
lives of half a dozen men, Bert Hagan's on West Broadway, for instance,
Markel's, and others', had been laid bare to the last shred, but nowhere
could be found the one vital point that linked their lives with hers,
that would account for her intimate knowledge of them, and so furnish
him with the clew that would then with certainty lead him to a solution
of her identity.

It was baffling, puzzling, unbelievable, bordering, indeed, on the
miraculous--herself, everything about her, her acts, her methods, her
cleverness, intangible in one sense, were terrifically real in another.
Jimmie Dale shook his head. The miraculous and this practical, everyday
life were wide and far apart. There was nothing miraculous about it--it
was only that the key to it was, so far, beyond his reach.

And then suddenly Jimmie Dale shrugged his shoulders in consonance with
a whimsical change in both mood and thought.

"Larry the Bat, is a hard taskmaster!" he muttered facetiously. "I'm
afraid I'm not very presentable this evening--no bath this morning,
and no shave, and, after nearly a month of make-up, that beastly grease
paint gets into the skin creases in a most intimate way." He chuckled
as the thought of old Jason, his butler, came to him. "I saw Jason,
torn between two conflicting emotions, shaking his head over the black
circles under my eyes last night--he didn't know whether to worry over
the first signs of a galloping decline, or break his heart at witnessing
the young master he had dandled on his knees going to the damnation
bowwows and turning into a confirmed roue! I guess I'll have to mind
myself, though. Even Carruthers detached his mind far enough from his
editor