“I suppose you think the girl is worth going to Hell for, even if the money isn’t,” he had written.  “Maybe she is.  Some women are, perhaps.  But don’t forget that if she loves you, you will be dragging her down there too.  Pretty thought, isn’t it?  I don’t mean any future-life business either.  That’s rot.  I heard enough of that when I was a boy to sicken me of it forever.  It is the here and now Hell a man pays for his sins with, and that is God’s truth, Alan Massey.”

And Alan, sitting in his luxurious studio reading the letter, crushed it in his hands and groaned aloud.  He needed no commentary on the “here and now Hell” from Jim Roberts.  He was living it those summer days if ever a man did.

It wasn’t the money now.  Alan told himself he no longer cared for that, hated it in fact.  It was Tony now, all Tony, and the horrible fear lest Roberts betray him and shut the gates of Paradise upon him forever.  Sometimes in his agony of fear he could almost have been glad to end it all with one shot of the silver-mounted automatic he kept always near, to beat Jim Roberts to the bliss of oblivion in the easiest way.

But Alan Massey had an incorrigible belief in his luck.  Just as he had hoped, until he had all but believed, that his cousin John was as dead as he had told that very person he was, so now he hoped against all reason that he would be saved at the eleventh hour, that Roberts would go to his death carrying with him the secret that would destroy himself if it ceased to be a secret.

Those unmailed letters haunted him, however, day and night, so much so, in fact, that he took a journey to Boston one day and sought out the little cigar store again.  But this time he had not mounted the stairs.  His business was with the black-eyed boy.  With one fifty dollar bill he bought the lad’s promise to destroy the letters and the packet in Robert’s drawer in the event of the latter’s death; secured also the promise that if at any time before his death Roberts gave orders that either letter should be mailed, the boy would send the same not to the address on the envelope but to Alan Massey.  If the boy kept faith with his pledges there would be another fifty coming to him after the death of the man.  He bought the lad even as Roberts had once bought himself.  It was a sickening transaction but it relieved his mind considerably and catered in a measure to that incorrigible hope within him.

But he paid a price too.  Fifty miles away from Boston was Tony Holiday on her Heaven kissing hill.  He was mad to go to her but dared not, lest this fresh corruption in some way betray itself to her clear gaze.

So he went back to New York without seeing her and Tony never knew he had been so near.

And that night Jim Roberts took an unexpected turn for the worse and died, foiled of that last highly anticipated spice of malice in flipping the coin that was to decide Alan Massey’s fate.