Jimmie Dale turned away his head.  There were tears in her eyes.  The old sense of unreality was strong upon him again.  He was listening to the Tocsin’s story.  It was strange that he should be doing that—­that it could be really so!  It seemed as though magically he had been transported out of the world where for years past he had lived with danger lurking at every turn, where men set watch about his house to trap him, where the denizens of the underworld yowled like starving beasts to sink their fangs in him, where the police were ceaselessly upon his trail to wreak an insensate vengeance upon him; it seemed as though he had been transported away from all that to something that he had dreamed might, perhaps, sometime happen, that he had hoped might happen, that he had longed for always, but now that it was his, that it also was full of the sense of the unreal.  And yet as his mind followed the thread of her story, and leaped ahead and vaguely glimpsed what was to come, he was conscious in a sort of premonitory way of a vaster peril than any he had ever known, as though forces, for the moment masked, were arrayed against him whose strength and whose malignity were beyond human parallel.  In what a strange, almost incoherent way his brain was working!  He roused himself a little and looked around him—­and, with a shock, the starkness of the room, the abject, pitiful air of destitution brought home to him with terrific, startling force the significance of the scene in which he was playing a part.  His face set suddenly in hard lines.  That she should have been brought to assume such a life as this—­forced out of her environment of wealth and refinement, forced in her purity to rub shoulders with the vile, the dissolute, forced to exist as such a creature amid the crime and vice, the wretched horror of the underworld that swirled around her!  There was anger now upon him, burning, hot—­a merciless craving that was a savage, hungry lust for vengeance.

And then she was speaking again: 

“Father’s death occurred very shortly after my uncle’s message advising us to postpone our trip was received.  On his death, Travers, very naturally, as father’s lawyer, cabled my uncle to come to New York at once; and my uncle replied, saying that he was coming by the first steamer.”

She paused again—­but only for an instant, as though to frame her thoughts in words.

“I have told you that I had never seen my uncle, that even my father had not seen him for twenty years; and I have told you that the man you know as Henry LaSalle is an impostor—­I am using the word ‘uncle’ now when I refer to him simply to avoid confusion.  You are, perhaps, expecting me to say that I took a distinctive dislike to him from the moment he arrived?  On the contrary, I had every reason to be predisposed toward him; and, indeed, was rather agreeably surprised than otherwise—­he was not nearly so uncouth and unpolished as, somehow, I had pictured his life would have made him.  Do you understand, Jimmie?  He was kind, sympathetic; and, in an apathetic way, I liked him.  I say ‘apathetic’ because I think that best describes my own attitude toward every one and everything following father’s death until—­that night.”