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A grunt came from the open window by which the girl had entered. Both of them wheeled toward it. Framed in it was a burly, red-faced man who wore a shiny blue serge suit and a black derby hat. He threw one thick leg over the sill and came into the room with heavy, bearlike agility. —”Well, well” — the words came complacently from his thick-lipped mouth, under a close-clipped gray moustache — “if it ain’t my old friend Angel Grace!”

“Cassidy!” the girl exclaimed weakly, and then relapsed into sullen stoicism.

Carter took a step forward.

“What—”

“‘S all right!” the newcomer assured him, displaying a bright badge. “Detective-Sergeant Cassidy. I was passin’ and sported somebody makin’ your fire escape. Decided to wait until they left and nab ’em with the goods. Got tired of waitin’ and came up for a look-see.”

He turned jovially to the girl.

“And here it turns out to be the Angel herself! Come on, kid, let’s take a ride.”

Carter put out a detaining hand as she started submissively toward the detective.

“Wait a minute! Can’t we fix this thing up? I don’t want to prosecute the lady.”

Cassidy leered from the girl to Carter and back, and then shook his head.

“Can’t be done! The Angel is wanted for half a dozen jobs. Don’t make no difference whether you make charges against her or not — she’ll go over for plenty anyways.”

The girl nodded concurrence.

“Thanks, old dear,” she told Carter, with an only partially successful attempt at nonchalance, “but they want me pretty bad.”

But Carter would not submit without a struggle. The gods do not send a real flesh-and-blood feminine crook into a writer’s rooms every evening in the week. The retention of such a gift was worth contending for. The girl must have within her, he thought, material for thousands, tens of thousands, of words of fiction. Was that a boon to be lightly surrendered? And then her attractiveness was in itself something; and a still more potent claim on his assistance — though not perhaps so clearly explainable — was the mottled area his fists had left on the smooth flesh of her cheek.

“Can’t we arrange it somehow?” he asked. “Couldn’t we fix it so that the charges might be — er — unofficially disregarded for the present?”

Cassidy’s heavy brows came down and the red of his face darkened.

“Are you tryin’ to —”

He stopped, and his small blue eyes narrowed almost to the point of vanishing completely.

“Go ahead! You’re doin’ the talkin’.”

Bribery, Carter knew, was a serious matter, and especially so when directed toward an officer of the law. The law is not to be lightly set aside, perverted, by an individual. To fling to this gigantic utensil a few bits of green-engraved paper, expecting thus to turn it from its course, was, to say the least, a foolhardy proceeding.

Yet the law as represented by this fat Cassidy in baggy, not too immaculate garments, while indubitably the very same law, seemed certainly less awe-inspiring, less unapproachable. Almost it took on a human aspect — the aspect of a man who was not entirely without his faults. The law just now, in fact, looked out through little blue eyes that were manifestly greedy, for all their setting in a poker face.

Carter hesitated, trying to find the words in which his offer would be most attractively dressed; but the detective relieved him of the necessity of broaching the subject.

“Listen, mister,” he said candidly. “I get you all right! But on the level, I don’t think it’d be worth what it’d cost you.”

“What would it cost?”

“Well, there’s four hundred in rewards offered for her that I know of — maybe more.”