It was a year since she had written him.  She!  Jimmie Dale did not smile, his lips were pressed hard together.  Not a very intimate or personal appellation, that—­but he knew her by no other.  It was a woman, surely—­the hand-writing was feminine, the diction eminently so—­and had she not come herself that night to Jason!  He remembered the last letter, apart from the one to-night, that he had received from her.  It was a year ago now—­and the letter had been hardly more than a note.  The police had worked themselves into a frenzy over the Gray Seal, the papers had grown absolutely maudlin—­and she had written, in her characteristic way: 

Things are a little too warm, aren’t they, Jimmie?  Let’s let them cool for a year.

Since then until to-night he had heard nothing from her.  It was a strange compact that he had entered into—­so strange that it could never have known, could never know a parallel—­unique, dangerous, bizarre, it was all that and more.  It had begun really through his connection with his father’s business—­the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals—­when his brains, turned into that channel, had been pitted against the underworld, against the methods of a thousand different crooks from Maine to California, the report of whose every operation had reached him in the natural course of business, and every one of which he had studied in minutest detail.  It had begun through that—­but at the bottom of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit.

He had meant to set the police by the ears, using his gray-seal device both as an added barb and that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved—­he had meant to laugh at them and puzzle them to the verge of madness, for in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime—­and he had succeeded.  And then he had gone too far—­and he had been caught—­by her.  That string of pearls, which, to study whose effect facetiously, he had so idiotically wrapped around his wrist, and which, so ironically, he had been unable to loosen in time and had been forced to carry with him in his sudden, desperate dash to escape from Marx’s the big jeweler’s, in Maiden Lane, whose strong room he had toyed with one night, had been the lever which, at first, she had held over him.

The bus was on Fifth Avenue now, and speeding rapidly down the deserted thoroughfare.  Jimmie Dale looked up at the lighted windows of the St. James Club as they went by, smiled whimsically, and shifted in his seat, seeking a more comfortable position.