_Slavonia_ for Naples. The first man is MacNutt."

"MacNutt!" ejaculated the listening woman.

"Yes, MacNutt! He compromised with Penfield and swung in with him when
the district-attorney started pounding at them both. The second man is
a lawyer named Keenan, who was disbarred for conspiracy in the Brayton
divorce case. Keenan and his papers are due at Genoa on Friday. I
found some of this out on board the yacht. I thought it over--and it
was the only way open for me. I couldn't stand out against it all, any
longer. I thought I could make the plunge, without your ever knowing
it--and perhaps get enough to keep you out of any more messes like
this!"

"You had given me up?" she cried, reprovingly.

"No--no--no--I'd only given up waiting for chances to _find you_. My
God, don't you suppose I knew you needed me!"

"It would have been too late!" she said, in her dead voice. "It's too
late, already!"

"Then you don't care?" he demanded, almost brokenly.

"I'll never complain, or whine, again!" she answered with dreary
listlessness.

"Then why _are_ you in this room?"

"_I mean that I've given up myself_. I'm in it, now, as deep as you!
I couldn't fight it back any longer--it _had_ to come!"

"But why, and how! Why don't you explain?"

He could feel her groping away from him in the darkness.

"Wait," she whispered.

"But why should I wait?" he demanded.

"Listen! That second room door is still unlocked, and there's danger
enough here, without inviting it."

He groped after her into the bedroom. He could hear the gentle scrape
of the key and the muffled sound of the lock as she turned it, followed
by the cautious slide of the brass bolt, lower on the door. He waited
for her, standing at the foot of the bed. He could hear her sigh of
weariness as she sat down on the edge of the disordered mattress.
Then, remembering that he had cut the wires of only the larger room, he
felt his way to the button at the head of the bed. He snapped the
current open and instantly the blinding white light flooded the chamber.

"_Is_ it safe here, any longer?" she asked restlessly, pausing a moment
to accustom her eyes to the light, and then gazing up at him with an
impersonal studiousness of stare that seemed to wall and bar her off
from him. Still again he was oppressed by some sense of alienation, of
looming tragedy between them. She, too, must have known some shadow of
that feeling, for he saw the look of tr