yelped at his heels, but every man, woman, and child in
the city. The man had not voiced his own sentiments--he had voiced the
sentiments of New York! And it was quite on the cards that if he, Jimmie
Dale, were ever caught his destination would not even be the death cell
and the chair at Sing Sing--his fellow citizens had reached a pitch
where they would be quite capable of literally tearing him to pieces if
they ever got their hands on him!

And yet there were a few, a very few, a handful out of five millions,
who sometimes remembered perhaps to thank God that the Gray Seal
lived--that was his reward. That--and SHE, whose mysterious letters
prompted and impelled his, the Gray Seal's, acts! She--nameless,
fascinating in her brilliant resourcefulness, amazing in her power, a
woman whose life was bound up with his and yet held apart from him in
the most inexplicable, absorbing way; a woman he had never seen, save
for her gloved arm in the limousine that night, who at one unexpected
moment projected a dazzling, impersonal existence across his path, and
the next, leaving him battling for his life where greed and passion and
crime swirled about him, was gone!

Jimmie Dale threaded the small, crowded rooms--the interior of
Marlianne's had never been altered from the days when the place had been
a family residence of some pretension--and, reaching the hall, received
his hat from the frowsy-looking boy in attendance. He passed outside,
and, at the top of the steps, paused as he took his cigarette case
from his pocket. It was nearly a week since Carling, the cashier of
the Hudson-Mercantile National Bank, had been found dead in his home,
a bottle that had contained hydrocyanic acid on the floor beside him;
nearly a week since Bookkeeper Bob, unaware that he had ever been under
temporary suspicion for the robbery of the bank, had, equally unknown
to himself, been cleared of any complicity in that affair--and yet, as
witness the conversation of a moment ago, it was still the topic of New
York, still the vital issue that filled the maw of the newspapers
with ravings, threats, and execrations against the Gray Seal, snarling
virulently the while at the police for the latter's ineptitude,
inefficiency, and impotence!

Jimmie Dale closed his cigarette case with a snap that was almost human
in its irony, dropped it back into his pocket, and lighted a match--but
the flame was arrested halfway to the tip of his cigarette, as his eyes