ay, and she would be in his arms!

"It's for my sake to-night!" His face grew suddenly tense, as the words
came back to him. That "hour" wasn't over yet! It was no hysterical
exaggeration that had prompted her to call her enemies the most powerful
and pitiless organisation of criminals that the world had ever known.
It was not the Tocsin's way to exaggerate. The words would be literally
true. The very life she had led for the three years that had gone stood
out now as a grim proof of her assertion.

Jimmie Dale replaced the flooring, carefully brushed the dust back into
the cracks, spread the oilcloth into place, and stood up. Who and what
was this organisation? What was between it and the Tocsin? What was this
immense fortune that was at stake? And what was this priceless packet
that was so crucial, that meant victory now, ay, and her life, too, she
had said?

The questions swept upon him in a sort of breathless succession. Why had
she not let him play a part in this? True, she had told him why--that
she dared not expose him to the risk. Risk! Was there any risk that the
Gray Seal had not taken, and at her instance! He did not understand, he
smiled a little uncertainly, as he reached up to turn out the gas. There
were a good many things that he did not understand about the Tocsin!

The room was in darkness, and with the darkness Jimmie Dale's mind
centred on the work immediately before him. To enter the tenement where
he was known and had an acknowledged right as Larry the Bat was one
thing; for Jimmie Dale to be discovered there was quite another.

He crossed the room, opened the door silently, stood for a moment
listening, then stepped out into the black, musty, ill-smelling hallway,
closing the door behind him. He stooped and locked it. The querulous cry
of a child reached him from somewhere above--a murmur of voices, muffled
by closed doors, from everywhere. How many families were housed beneath
that sordid roof he had never known, only that there was miserable
poverty there as well as vice and crime, only that Larry the Bat, who
possessed a room all to himself, was as some lordly and super-being to
these fellow tenants who shared theirs with so many that there was not
air enough for all to breathe.

He had no doors to pass--his was next to the staircase. He began to
descend. They could scream and shriek, those stairs, like aged humans,
twisted and rheumatic, at the least ungentle touch. But there was no
soun