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“You are under the dead-fall, aye,” said Mason. “The cunning of my enemy is sublime.”

“Your enemy?” gasped Walcott. “When did you come into it? How in God’s name did you know it? How your enemy?”

Mason looked down at the wide bulging eyes of the man.

“Who should know better than I?” he said. “Haven’t I broken through all the traps and plots that she could set?”

“She? She trap you?” The man’s voice was full of horror.

“The old schemer,” muttered Mason. “The cowardly old schemer, to strike in the back; but we can beat her. She did not count on my helping you–I, who know her so well.”

Mason’s face was red, and his eyes burned. In the midst of it all he dropped his hands and went over to the fire. Samuel Walcott arose, panting, and stood looking at Mason, with his hands behind him on the table. The naturally strong nature and the rigid school in which the man had been trained presently began to tell. His composure in part returned and he thought rapidly. What did this strange man know? Was he simply making shrewd guesses, or had he some mysterious knowledge of this matter? Walcott could not know that Mason meant only Fate, that he believed her to be his great enemy. Walcott had never before doubted his own ability to meet any emergency. This mighty jerk had carried him off his feet. He was unstrung and panic-stricken. At any rate this man had promised help. He would take it. He put the paper and envelope carefully into his pocket, smoothed out his rumpled coat, and going over to Mason touched him on the shoulder.

“Come,” he said, “if you are to help me we must go.”

The man turned and followed him without a word. In the hall Mason put on his hat and overcoat, and the two went out into the street. Walcott hailed a cab, and the two were driven to his house on the avenue. Walcott took out his latchkey, opened the door, and led the way into the library. He turned on the light and motioned Mason to seat himself at the table. Then he went into another room and presently returned with a bundle of papers and a decanter of brandy. He poured out a glass of the liquor and offered it to Mason. The man shook his head. Walcott poured the contents of the glass down his own throat. Then he set the decanter down and drew up a chair on the side of the table opposite Mason.

“Sir,” said Walcott, in a voice deliberate, indeed, but as hollow as a sepulcher, “I am done for. God has finally gathered up the ends of the net, and it is knotted tight.”

“Am I not here to help you?” said Mason, turning savagely. “I can beat Fate. Give me the details of her trap.”

He bent forward and rested his arms on the table. His streaked gray hair was rumpled and on end, and his face was ugly. For a moment Walcott did not answer. He moved a little into the shadow; then he spread the bundle of old yellow papers out before him.

“To begin with,” he said, “I am a living lie, a gilded crime-made sham, every bit of me. There is not an honest piece anywhere. It is all lie. I am a liar and a thief before men. The property which I possess is not mine, but stolen from a dead man. The very name which I bear is not my own, but is the bastard child of a crime. I am more than all that–I am a murderer; a murderer before the law; a murderer before God; and worse than a murderer before the pure woman whom I love more than anything that God could make.”