re in the elevator by this time, mounting noiselessly upward.
Durkin could feel the fire of the brandy soar up to his brain and sing
through his veins. MacNutt supported him as they stepped from the
elevator cage into a darkened room. On the far side of this room, from
between two heavy portieres, a gash of light cut into the otherwise
unbroken gloom.

A sound of voices floated out to them and MacNutt tightened his grip on
the other's arm, as they stood and listened, for it was Frances Durkin
and Keenan talking together, hurriedly, impetuously, earnestly.

"But does it make any difference what I have been, or who I am?" the
woman's voice was asking. "I did my part; I did my work for you. Now
you ought to give me a chance!"

Still holding the other back, MacNutt circled sidewise, until they came
into the line of vision with the unsuspecting pair in the other room.
Keenan, they could see, held one heavy hand on the woman's shoulder,
intimately; and she, in turn, looked up into his face, in an attitude
as open and intimate.

"You know, now, what I have known before you!" whispered MacNutt, into
the ear of the tortured Durkin.

"You lie!" murmured Durkin's lips, but no sound came from them, for his
staring eyes were still on the scene before him.

"Listen then, you fool!" was all his tempter whispered back. And they
stood together, listening.

"But I _am_ giving you a chance," Keenan next replied, and his long,
melancholy Celtic face was white and colorless with emotion. "I'm
giving you the only chance that life holds for both of us!"

"I know it!" said the woman.

Keenan's arms went out to her, and she did not draw back. Instead, she
reached up her own seemingly wearied and surrendering arms, without a
word, and held him there in her obliterating embrace. He swayed a
little, where he stood, and for a moment neither moved nor spoke.

MacNutt, narrowly watching the shadowy face of Durkin, saw pictured on
that pallid and changing countenance fear and revolt, one momentary
touch of despairing doubt, and then a mounting and all-consuming
passion of blind rage.

In that drunken rage seemed to culminate all his misgivings, his
suspicions, his apparent betrayals of the past. He trembled and shook
like a man in a vertigo; the fingers of his upraised right hand opened
and closed spasmodically; his flaccid lips fell apart, vacuously,
insanely.

"I'll kill her!" he ejaculated under his breath. MacNutt knew tha