ibly, as an excuse for taking this second risk. So, then, with the
third essential already resting at the bottom of an inner waistcoat
pocket, he was prepared; and he had been waiting for his opportunity
from the moment when they crept in through the basement window and felt
their way along, she resolutely leading, to the windowless, shrouded
middle room here on the second floor.

* * * * *

How she hated him, feared him too! He could munch his peaches and uncork
his warm, cheap wine in this very room, with that bathroom just yonder
and these flies all about. From under her fingers, interlaced over her
forehead, her eyes roved past him, searching the littered room for the
twentieth time in the hour, looking, seeking--and suddenly they fell on
something--a crushed and rumpled hat of her own, a milliner's
masterpiece, laden with florid plumage, lying almost behind him on a
couch end where some prying detective had dropped it, with a big, round
black button shining dully from the midst of its damaged tulle crown.
She knew that button well. It was the imitation-jet head of a hatpin--a
steel hatpin--that was ten inches long and maybe longer.

She looked and looked at the round, dull knob, like a mystic held by a
hypnotist's crystal ball, and she began to breathe a little faster; she
could feel her resolution tighten within her like a turning screw.

Beneath her brows, heavy and thick for a woman's, her eyes flitted back
to the man. With the careful affectation of doing nothing at all, a
theatricalism that she detected instantly, but for which she could guess
no reason, he was cutting away at the damp, close-gnawed seed of the
peach, trying apparently to fashion some little trinket--a toy basket,
possibly--from it. His fingers moved deftly over its slick, wet surface.
He had already poured out some of the champagne. One of the pint bottles
stood empty, with the distorted button-headed cork lying beside it, and
in two glasses the yellow wine was fast going flat and dead in that
stifling heat. It still spat up a few little bubbles to the surface, as
though minute creatures were drowning in it down below. The man was
sweating more than ever, so that, under the single, low-turned gas jet,
his crooked face had a greasy shine to it. A church clock down in the
next block struck twelve slowly. The sleepless flies buzzed evilly.

"Look out again, won't you?" he said for perhaps the tenth time in two