his dime in the conductor's little resonant-belled cash receiver, and
then settled back on the uncomfortable, bumping, cushionless seat.

On rattled the bus; it turned across town, passed the Circle, and
headed for Fifth Avenue--but Jimmie Dale, to all appearances, was quite
oblivious of its movements.

It was a year since she had written him. SHE! Jimmie Dale did not smile,
his lips were pressed hard together. Not a very intimate or personal
appellation, that--but he knew her by no other. It WAS a woman,
surely--the hand-writing was feminine, the diction eminently so--and had
SHE not come herself that night to Jason! He remembered the last letter,
apart from the one to-night, that he had received from her. It was
a year ago now--and the letter had been hardly more than a note. The
police had worked themselves into a frenzy over the Gray Seal, the
papers had grown absolutely maudlin--and she had written, in her
characteristic way:


Things are a little too warm, aren't they, Jimmie? Let's let them cool
for a year.


Since then until to-night he had heard nothing from her. It was a
strange compact that he had entered into--so strange that it could never
have known, could never know a parallel--unique, dangerous, bizarre, it
was all that and more. It had begun really through his connection with
his father's business--the business of manufacturing safes that should
defy the cleverest criminals--when his brains, turned into that channel,
had been pitted against the underworld, against the methods of a