that he felt confident she knew nothing of—­that was, or, rather, had become, almost a dual personality with him.  From the Sanctuary, that miserable and disreputable room in a tenement on the East Side, a tenement that had three separate means of entrance and exit, he had emerged day after day as Larry the Bat, a character as well known and as well liked in the exclusive circles of the underworld as was Jimmie Dale in the most exclusive strata of New York’s society and fashion.  And it had been useless—­all useless.  Through his own endeavours, through the help of his friends of the underworld, the lives of half a dozen men, Bert Hagan’s on West Broadway, for instance, Markel’s, and others’, had been laid bare to the last shred, but nowhere could be found the one vital point that linked their lives with hers, that would account for her intimate knowledge of them, and so furnish him with the clew that would then with certainty lead him to a solution of her identity.

It was baffling, puzzling, unbelievable, bordering, indeed, on the miraculous—­herself, everything about her, her acts, her methods, her cleverness, intangible in one sense, were terrifically real in another.  Jimmie Dale shook his head.  The miraculous and this practical, everyday life were wide and far apart.  There was nothing miraculous about it—­it was only that the key to it was, so far, beyond his reach.

And then suddenly Jimmie Dale shrugged his shoulders in consonance with a whimsical change in both mood and thought.

“Larry the Bat, is a hard taskmaster!” he muttered facetiously.  “I’m afraid I’m not very presentable this evening—­no bath this morning, and no shave, and, after nearly a month of make-up, that beastly grease paint gets into the skin creases in a most intimate way.”  He chuckled as the thought of old Jason, his butler, came to him.  “I saw Jason, torn between two conflicting emotions, shaking his head over the black circles under my eyes last night—­he didn’t know whether to worry over the first signs of a galloping decline, or break his heart at witnessing the young master he had dandled on his knees going to the damnation bowwows and turning into a confirmed roue!  I guess I’ll have to mind myself, though.  Even Carruthers detached his mind far enough from his editorial desk and the hope of exclusively publishing the news of the Gray Seal’s capture in the morning news-Argus, to tell me I was looking seedy.  It’s wonderful the way a little paint will metamorphose a man!  Well, anyway, here’s for a good hot tub to-night, and a fresh start!”

He quickened his pace.  There were still three blocks to go, and here was no hurrying, jostling crowd to impede his progress; indeed, as far as he could see up the Drive, there was not a pedestrian in sight.  And then, as he walked, involuntarily, insistently, his mind harked back into the old groove again.

“I’ve tried to picture her,” said Jimmie Dale softly to himself.  “I’ve tried to picture her a hundred, yes, a thousand times, and—­”