er inquiries. And Jason--"

"Yes, sir?"

"If she telephones again, try and find out where the call comes from."

"I haven't forgotten what you said once, Master Jim, sir," said the old
man eagerly. "And I've been trying that sir, all day. They've all come
from different pay stations, sir."

A mirthless little smile tinged Jimmie Dale's lips. Of course! He might
have known! It was always that way, always the same. He was as near to
the solution of her identity at that moment as he had been years ago,
when she, in some mysterious way, alone of all the world, had identified
him as the Gray Seal!

"Very good, Jason," he said quietly. "Don't bother about it any more.
It will be all right. You can expect me when you see me. Good-night." He
hung the receiver on the hook, walked out of the booth, and mechanically
reached the street.

All right! It was far from "all right"--very far from it. It was no
trivial thing, that letter; they never had been trivial things, those
letters of hers, that involved so often a matter of life and death--as
this one now, perhaps, as her actions would seem to indicate, involved
life and death more urgently than any that had gone before. It was far
from all right--at a moment when his own position, his own safety, was
at best but a desperate chance; when his every energy, brain, wit, and
cunning were taxed to the utmost to save himself! And yet, somehow, some
way, at any cost, he must get that letter--and at any cost he must act
upon it! To fail her was to fail utterly in everything that failure in
its most miserable, its widest sense, implied--failure in that which
rose paramount to every other consideration in life!

Fail her! Jimmie Dale's lips thinned into a hard, drawn line--and then
parted slowly in a curiously whimsical smile. It would be a strange
burglary that he had decided upon, in order that he might not fail
her--stranger than any the Gray Seal had ever committed, and, in some
respects, even more perilous!

He started along the Bowery, walking briskly now, toward the nearest
subway station, at Astor Place, his mind for the moment electing to face
the situation in a humour as whimsical as his smile. Supposing that,
as Larry the Bat, he were caught and arrested during the next hour, in
Jimmie's Dale's residence on Riverside Drive! With his arrest as Larry
the Bat, Jimmie's Dale would automatically disappear. Would follow then
the suspicion that Jimmie Dale, the millionaire, had