rybody else had failed I just had
to try. My conscience kept at me. Success would turn so much misery into
happiness, so much sickness into health, so much crime into usefulness.
And to-night, I believe, if we're lucky--Jim! I want you to be there."

"She thinks she's spotted the house," the inspector said softly. "That's
what she had to see me about. She wants a raid arranged for to-night."

Garth's voice was anxious.

"How are you working, Nora? I don't like it. I wish you were out of it."

But Nora would tell him nothing, and he realized instinctively that in
her crusade she had taken desperate chances and would face more,
probably the worst, to-night.

"You must tell us," she said, "how you found the Chinaman. I've no doubt
he was one of them. In itself his death was a confession--a pitifully
silent one."

Garth told his story of the man in the limousine, of the trailing
Oriental, of what he had learned at the Bureau of Licenses. Nora offered
no interpretation, but she smiled sympathetically at the inspector's
rage. He saw in the affair more than Garth. To him it meant an
underhanded attempt on the part of the society to trap a material
witness.

"They put it up to me," he grumbled, "then they want to put it over me.
Manford gets a line of his own and keeps it to himself. Out for a little
glory and advertising! What happens every time I work with these
silk-stockinged, fur-coated societies that think they know more about
vice than the police. And to think, Garth, you snitched him away from
them, then let him croak!"

Nora arose.

"No use crying over spilt milk, father."

She prepared to leave. Garth followed her to the hallway. He urged her
to let him share her plans, to give him a more pronounced part in the
risks. She shook her head.

"It's best to let me work this alone until the last minute, Jim."

His one grain of comfort was her insistence that he should be in the van
of the raiding party. So he watched her leave, her grace and beauty
transformed by an inspired ingenuity into the bent lines and the haggard
distortion of a crone.

The day lingered interminably. Whatever Nora had told her father he
guarded with an unqualified stubbornness. Aside from the fact that he
was to join the inspector in an up-town precinct house at ten o'clock,
Garth walked into the affair wholly ignorant of plans or probabilities.

When finally the hour struck and he kept the appointment, he found
Manford, in evening