thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had
any."

"Yes; that is what he told me."

"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"

"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone
through the grips on the train."

"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at
least try to find the thief?"

He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and
was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a
place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.

"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered
evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you--you who had already
troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."

"So you just let the money go?"

"So I just let it go."

She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with
delight.

"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she
exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly
indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table,
please."

He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet
within, the electric bulb suspended over the table seemed to grow black
and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a
click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery
stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started
out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again
the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly--or to slay, if a
life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed
the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he
could neither banish nor control.

"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he
strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was
whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.

"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously
exultant.

"You--you opened the package?" he went on, once more pushing the
importunate devil aside.

"Naturally. How else would I have known that it was worth locking up?"

Her coolness astounded him. If she knew the whole truth--and the demon
at his ear was assuring him that she must know it--she must also know
that she was confronting a great peril; the peril of one who voluntarily
sh