“That rather depends upon what it is you want from me?”

“I want you to leave this country and never set foot in it again.  That’s what I want of you.  I want you to get back to your London slums and write your stuff there and have it played in your own poky little theatres.  I want you out of New York, and I want you out quick.”

“Then I am afraid,” Philip regretted, “that we are wasting time.  I haven’t the least intention of leaving New York.”

“Well, we’ll go through the rigmarole,” Power continued gruffly.  “We’ve got to understand one another.  There’s my cheque book in that safe.  A million dollars if you leave this country—­alone—­within twenty-four hours, and stay away for the rest of your life.”

Philip raised his eyebrows.  He was lounging slightly against the desk.

“I should have no use for a million dollars, Mr. Power,” he said.  “If I had, I should not take it from you, and further, the conditions you suggest are absurd.”

“Bribery no good, eh?” Mr. Power observed.  “What about threats?  There was a man once who wrote a letter to a certain woman, which I found.  I killed him a few days afterwards.  There was a sort of a scuffle, but it was murder, right enough.  I am nearer the door than you are, and I should say about three times as strong.  How would a fight suit you?”

Ware’s hand was in his overcoat pocket.

“Not particularly,” he answered.  “Besides, it wouldn’t be fair.  You see, I am armed, and you’re not.”

As though for curiosity, he drew from his pocket the little revolver which Honeybrook had slipped into it.  Power looked at it and shrugged his shoulders.

“We’ll leave that out, then, for the moment,” he said.  “Now listen to me.  I’m off on another tack now.  Eight years ago I met Elizabeth Dalstan.  I was thirty-eight years old then—­I am forty-six now.  You young men nowadays go through your life, they tell me, with a woman on your hands most of the time, waste yourself out in a score of passions, go through the same old rigmarole once a year or something like it.  I was married when I was twenty-four.  I got married to lay my hands on the first ten thousand dollars I needed.  My wife left me fifteen years ago.  You may have read of her.  She was a storekeeper’s daughter then.  She has a flat in Paris now, a country house in England, a villa at Monte Carlo and another at Florence.  She lives her life, I live mine.  She’s the only woman I’d ever spoken a civil word to until I met Elizabeth Dalstan, or since.”

Philip was interested despite his violent antipathy to the man.

“A singular record of fidelity,” he remarked suavely.