immie Dale turned away his head. There were tears in her eyes. The old
sense of unreality was strong upon him again. He was listening to the
Tocsin's story. It was strange that he should be doing that--that
it could be really so! It seemed as though magically he had been
transported out of the world where for years past he had lived with
danger lurking at every turn, where men set watch about his house to
trap him, where the denizens of the underworld yowled like starving
beasts to sink their fangs in him, where the police were ceaselessly
upon his trail to wreak an insensate vengeance upon him; it seemed as
though he had been transported away from all that to something that he
had dreamed might, perhaps, sometime happen, that he had hoped might
happen, that he had longed for always, but now that it was his, that it
also was full of the sense of the unreal. And yet as his mind followed
the thread of her story, and leaped ahead and vaguely glimpsed what was
to come, he was conscious in a sort of premonitory way of a vaster peril
than any he had ever known, as though forces, for the moment masked,
were arrayed against him whose strength and whose malignity were beyond
human parallel. In what a strange, almost incoherent way his brain was
working! He roused himself a little and looked around him--and, with a
shock, the starkness of the room, the abject, pitiful air of destitution
brought home to him with terrific, startling force the significance of
the scene in which he was playing a part. His face set suddenly in
hard lines. That she should have been brought to assume such a life as
this--forced out of her environment of wealth and refinement, forced
in her purity to rub shoulders with the vile, the dissolute, forced to
exist as such a creature amid the crime and vice, the wretched horror
of the underworld that swirled around her! There was anger now upon him,
burning, hot--a merciless craving that was a savage, hungry lust for
vengeance.

And then she was speaking again:

"Father's death occurred very shortly after my uncle's message advising
us to postpone our trip was received. On his death, Travers, very
naturally, as father's lawyer, cabled my uncle to come to New York
at once; and my uncle replied, saying that he was coming by the first
steamer."

She paused again--but only for an instant, as though to frame her
thoughts in words.

"I have told you that I had never seen my uncle, that even my father had
not se