d
never be healed?

A thief! She loved a thief. She had fought a bitter, stubborn battle
with her common sense to convince herself that he was not a thief.
She had snatched hungrily at the incident that centered around those
handcuffs, so opportunely produced from the Adventurer's pocket. She had
tried to argue that those handcuffs not only suggested, but proved, he
was a police officer in disguise, working on some case in which Danglar
and the gang had been mixed up; and, as she tried to argue in this wise,
she tried to shut her eyes to the fact that the same pocket out of which
the handcuffs came was at exactly the same moment the repository of as
many stolen banknotes as it would hold. She had tried to argue that the
fact that he was so insistently at work to defeat Danglar's plans was
in his favor; but that argument, like all others, came quickly and
miserably to grief. Where the "leak" was, as Danglar called it, that
supplied the Adventurer with foreknowledge of the gang's movements, she
had no idea, save that perhaps the Adventurer and some traitor in the
gang were in collusion for their own ends--and that certainly did not
lift the Adventurer to any higher plane, or wash from him the stigma of
thief.

She clenched her hands. It was all an attempt at argument without the
basis of a single logical premise. It was silly and childish! Why hadn't
the man been an ordinary, plain, common thief and criminal--and looked
like one? She would never have been attracted to him then even through
gratitude! Why should he have all the graces and ear-marks of breeding?
Why should he have all the appearances of gentleman? It seemed a
needlessly cruel and additional blow that fate had dealt her, when
already she was living through days and nights of fear, of horror, of
trepidation, so great that at times it seemed she would literally lose
her reason. If he had not looked, yes, and at times, acted, so much like
a thorough-bred gentleman, there would never have come to her this hurt,
this gulf between them that could not now be spanned, and in a personal
way she would never have cared because he was--a thief.

Her mental soliloquy ended abruptly. She had reached the narrow driveway
that led in, between the two blocks of down-at-the-heels tenements, to
the courtyard at the rear that harbored Shluker's junk shop. And now,
unlike that other night when she had first paid a visit to the place,
she made no effort at concealment as she en