ith growing impatience through the
crowds that massed in front of various places of amusement. He had not
intended to come along the Bowery, and, except for what had occurred,
would have taken a less frequented street. He would turn off at the next
block.

He was in front of that moving-picture theatre again. "THE DOUBLE
LIFE"--his eyes were attracted involuntarily to the lurid, overdone
display. It seemed to threaten him; it seemed to dangle before him a
premonition as it were, of what the morning held in store; but now, too,
it seemed to feed into flame that smouldering fury that possessed him.
His life--or Whitey Mack's! Men, women, and the children who turned
night into day in that quarter of the city were clustered thick around
the signs, hiving like bees to the bald sensationalism. Almost savagely
he began to force his way through the crowd--and the next instant, like
a man stunned, had stopped in his tracks. His fingers had closed in a
fierce, spasmodic clutch over an envelope that had been thrust suddenly
into his hand.

"JIMMIE!" from somewhere came a low, quick voice. "Jimmie, it is
half-past eleven now--HURRY."

He whirled, scanning wildly this face, then that. It was her voice--HER
voice! The Tocsin! The sensitive fingers were telegraphing to his brain,
as they always did, that the texture of the envelope, too, was hers.
Her voice; yes, anywhere, out of a thousand voices, he would distinguish
hers--but her face, he had never seen that. Which, out of all the crowd
around him, was hers? Surely he could tell her by her dress; she would
be different; her personality alone must single her out. She--

"Say, have youse got de pip, or do youse t'ink youse owns de earth!" a
man flung at him, heaving and pushing to get by.

With a start, though he scarcely heard the man, Jimmie Dale moved on.
His brain was afire. All the irony of the world seemed massed in a
sudden, overwhelming attack upon him. It was useless--intuitively he
had known it was useless from the instant he had heard her voice. It was
always the same--always! For years she had eluded him like that, come
upon him without warning and disappeared, but leaving always that
tangible proof of her existence--a letter, the call of the Gray Seal to
arms. But to-night it was as it had never been before. It was not alone
baffled chagrin now, not alone the longing, the wild desire to see her
face, to look into her eyes--it was life and death. She had come at the