polite bows. I would not have missed this situation for anything."

"Tradesman!" Francis scoffed. "One can guess already at the plot
of your next novel."

"He has courage," Wilmore declared. "He has also a very
beautiful companion. Were you serious, Francis, when you told me
that that was his wife?"

"She herself was my informant," was the quiet reply.

Wilmore was puzzled.

"But she passed you just now without even a glance of
recognition, and I thought you told me at the club this afternoon
that all your knowledge of his evil ways came from her. Besides,
she looks at least twenty years younger than he does."

Francis, who had been watching his glass filled with champagne,
raised it to his lips and drank its contents steadily to the last
drop.

"I can only tell you what I know, Andrew," he said, as he set
down the empty glass. "The woman who is with him now is the
woman who spoke to me outside the Old Bailey this afternoon. We
went to a tea-shop together. She told me the story of his
career. I have never listened to so horrible a recital in my
life."

"And yet they are here together, dining tete-a-tete, on a night