adversity could mar. And now the diamond pendant was gone! He could well
understand how they had clung to that, and--

He started suddenly. Was he a fool, that he had wasted even a moment in
giving play to his thoughts! Voices were reaching him now from below,
footsteps were sounding from the lower hall, there was a creak upon the
stairs. They were coming!

He had hardly any need for the quick, searching glance he flung around
him--the plan that the Tocsin, had drawn was mapped out vividly in his
mind. He stepped backward softly through half-opened folding doors into
the room in the rear. From this room a door, he knew, opened into the
hallway. His escape, after all, need give him little concern. He had
only to step out into the hall after they passed, and make his way
downstairs. A woman's voice from the stairway came to him:

"My dear, you must have left the light burning."

"Unless, it was you," a man's voice answered in good-humoured banter.
"You were the last one in the room."

"But I am sure I didn't!" the feminine tones asserted positively.

The steps passed along the hall, and from behind the folding doors
Jimmie Dale saw an elderly couple enter the front room. Both were in
evening dress--and somehow, suddenly, at sight of them Jimmie Dale
swallowed hard. The old gentleman, kindly, blue-eyed, white-haired, was
very erect, very straight in spite of the fact that he must have been
close to seventy years of age, and with the sweet-faced, old-fashioned
little lady, with the gray hair, who stood beside him, they made a