without predictable end, but she
would have been a rare flame for a while. He wondered what she
meant to do; of course she had a plan. Should he try again, give
her another chance? No; there was one point upon which she had not
mystified him: he knew she really hated him.

. . . The wind was against the smoke that day; and his spirits
rose, as he walked in the brisk air with the rich sky above him.
After all, this venture upon his native purlieus had been fax from
fruitless: he could not have expected to do much better. He had
made his coup; he knew no other who could have done it. It was a
handsome bit of work, in fact, and possible only to a talented
native thoroughly sophisticated in certain foreign subtleties. He
knew himself for a rare combination.

He had a glimmer of Richard Lindley beginning at the beginning
again to build a modest fortune: it was the sort of thing the
Richard Lindleys were made for. Corliss was not troubled. Richard
had disliked him as a boy; did not like him now; but Corliss had
not taken his money out of malice for that. The adventurer was not
revengeful; he was merely impervious.

At the hotel, he learned that Moliterno's cable had not yet
arrived; but he went to an agency of one of the steamship lines
and reserved his passage, and to a railway ticket office and
secured a compartment for himself on an evening train. Then he
returned to his room in the hotel.

The mirror over the mantelpiece, in the front room of his suite,
showed him a fine figure of a man: hale, deep-chested, handsome,
straight and cheerful.

He nodded to it.

"Well, old top," he said, reviewing and summing up his whole
campaign, "not so bad. Not so bad, all in all; not so bad, old
top. Well played indeed!"

At a sound of footsteps approaching his door, he turned in casual
expectancy, thinking it might be a boy to notify him that
Moliterno's cable had arrived. But there was no knock, and the
door was flung wide open.

It was Vilas, and he had his gun with him this time. He had two.

There was a shallow clothes-closet in the wall near the fireplace,
and Corliss ran in there; but Vilas began to shoot through the
door.

Mutilated, already a dead man, and knowing it, Corliss came out,
and tried to run into the bedroom. It was no use.

Ray saved his last shot for himself. It did the work.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

There is a song of parting, an intentionally pathetic song, which
contains the line, "All the to