ngers, dirty-nailed, of Larry the
Bat, that none now would recognise as the slim tapering, wonderfully
sensitive fingers of Jimmie Dale, the fingers that had made the name of
the Gray Seal famous, whose tips mocked at bars and safes and locks,
and seemed to embody in themselves all the human senses, tightened
spasmodically on the edge of the table. Time! Time! Time! It seemed to
din in his ears. And while he sat there powerless, impotent, the
Crime Club was moving heaven and earth to find what HE must find--that
package--if he was to save this woman here, the woman whom he loved, she
who had been forced, through the machinations of these hell fiends,
to adopt the life of a wretched hag, to exist among the dregs of the
underworld, whose squalour and vice and wantonness none knew better than
he!

Jimmie Dale's face set grimly. Somewhere--somewhere in the past five
years of this life of hers in which she had been fighting the Crime
Club, pitting that clever brain of hers against it, MUST lie a clew.
She had told him her story only in baldest outline, with scarcely a
reference to her own personal acts, with barely a single detail. There
must be something, something that perhaps she had overlooked, something,
just the merest hint of something that would supply a starting point,
give him a glimmer of light.

She came back from across the room, and sank down in her chair again.
She did not speak--the question, that meant life and death to them both,
was in her eyes.

Jimmie answered the mute interrogation tersely.

"Not yet!" he said. Then, almost curtly, in a quick, incisive way, as
the keen, alert brain began to delve and probe: "You say this man Clarke
never returned to the house after that night?"

She nodded her head quietly.

"You are sure of that?" he insisted.

"Yes," she said. "I am sure."

"And you say that all these years you have kept a watch on the man who
is posing as your uncle, and that he never went anywhere, or associated
with any one, that would afford you a clew to this Crime Club?"

"Yes," she said again.

It was a moment before Jimmie Dale spoke.

"It's very strange!" he said musingly, at last. "So strange, in fact,
that it's impossible. He must have communicated with the others, and
communicated with them often. The game they were playing was too
big, too full of details, to admit of any other possibility. And the
telephone as an explanation isn't good enough."

"And yet," she said earnes