There were tears in Tony’s eyes as she finished her lover’s letter.  His unwonted humility touched her as no arrogance could ever have done.  His appeal to his desperate need moved her profoundly as such appeals will always move woman.  It is an old tale and one oft repeated.  Man crying out at a woman’s feet, “Save me!  Save me!  Myself I cannot save!” Woman, believing, because she longs to believe it, that salvation lies in her power, taking on herself the all but impossible mission for love’s high sake.

Tony Holiday believed, as all the million other women have believed since time began, that she could save her lover, loved him tenfold the more because he threw himself upon her mercy, came indeed perhaps to truly love him for the first time now with a kind of consecrated fervor which belonged all to the spirit even as the love that had come to her while they danced had belonged rather to the flesh.

* * * * *

And day by day Jim Roberts grew sicker and the gnawing thing crept up nearer to his heart.  Day by day he gloated over the goading whips he brandished over Alan Massey’s head, amused himself with the various developments it lay in his power to give to the situation as he passed out of life.

He wrote two letters from his sick bed.  The first one was addressed to Dick Carson, telling the full story of his own and Alan Massey’s share in the deliberate defraudment of that young man of his rightful name and estate.  It pleased him to read and reread this letter and to reflect that when it was mailed Alan Massey would drink the full cup of disgrace and exposure while he who was infinitely guiltier would be sleeping very quietly in a cool grave where hate, nor vengeance, nor even pity could touch him.

The other letter, which like the first he kept unmailed, was a less honest and less incriminating letter, filled with plausible half truths, telling how he had just become aware at last through coming into possession of some old letters of the identity of the boy he had once had in his keeping and who had run away from him, an identity which he now hastened to reveal in the interests of tardy justice.  The letter made no mention of Alan Massey nor of the unlovely bargain he had driven with that young man as the price of silence and the bliss of ignorance.  It was addressed to the lawyers who handled the Massey estate.

Roberts had followed up various trails and discovered that Antoinette Holiday was the girl Massey loved, discovered through the bribing of a Crest House servant, that the young man they called Carson was also presumably in love with the girl whose family had befriended him so generously in his need.  It was incredibly good he thought.  He could hardly have thought out a more diabolically clever plot if he had tried.  He could make Alan Massey writhe trebly, knowing these things.

Pursuing his malignant whim he wrote to Alan Massey and told him of the existence of the two letters, as yet unmailed, in his table drawer.  He made it clear that one of the letters damned Alan Massey utterly while the other only robbed him of his ill-gotten fortune, made it clear also that he himself did not know which of the two would be mailed in the end, possibly he would decide it by a flip of a coin.  Massey could only wait and see what happened.