lowly down
the street.

"The Tocsin! The Tocsin! The Tocsin!"--his brain seemed to be ringing
with the words, ringing with them in a note clear as a silver bell.
The Tocsin--at last! The woman who so strangely, so wonderfully, so
mysteriously had entered into his life, and possessed it, and filled it
with a love and yearning that had come to mold and sway and actuate
his very existence--the woman for whom he had fought; for whom he had
risked, and gladly risked, his wealth, his name, his honour--everything;
the woman for whose sake he, the Gray Seal, was sought and hounded as
the most notorious criminal of the age; she whose cleverness, whose
resourcefulness, whose amazing intimacy with the hidden things of the
underworld had seemed, indeed, to border on the supernatural; she, the
Tocsin--the woman whose face he had never seen before! The woman whose
face he had never seen before--and who now was that wretched hag that
hobbled along the street before him, begging, whining, and importuning
the passers-by to purchase of her pitiful wares!

He laughed a little--buoyantly. He had never pictured a first meeting
such as this! A hag? Yes! And one as disreputable in appearance as he
himself, as Larry the Bat, was disreputable! But he had seen her eyes!
Inimitable as was her disguise, she could not hide her eyes, or hide the
pledge they held of the beauty of form and feature beneath the tattered
rags and the touch of a master in the make-up that brought haggard want
and age into the face--and dimly he began to divine the source, the
means by which she had acquired the information that for years had
enabled her to plan their coups, that had enabled him to execute them
under the guise of crime, that for years had seemed beyond all human
reach.

Where was she going? Where was she taking him? But what did it matter!
The years of waiting were at an end--the years of mystery in a few
moments now would be mystery no more!

Ah! She had turned from the Bowery, and was heading east. He shuffled on
after her, guardedly, a half block behind. It was well that Jimmie Dale
had disappeared, that he was Larry the Bat again--the neighbourhood
was growing more and more one that Jimmie Dale could not long linger
in without attracting attention; while, on the other hand, it was the
natural environment of such as Larry the Bat and such as she, who was
leading him now to the supreme moment of his life. Yes, it was that--the
fulfillment of the yea