“Yes, sir,” said Jason; then hesitantly:  “Would you mind saying, sir, when you came in?”

“It’s of no consequence, Jason—­is it?”

“No, sir,” said Jason.

Jimmie Dale smiled in the darkness.

“Jason!”

“Yes, sir.”

“I wish you to remain where you are, without leaving that chair, for the next ten minutes.”  He moved across the room to the door.  “Good-night, Jason,” he said.

“Good-night, Master Jim—­good-night, sir—­oh, Lord!”

Jimmie Dale did not require that ten minutes; it was a very wide margin of safety to obviate the possibility of Jason, from a window, detecting the exit of a disreputable character from the house—­in three minutes he was turning the corner of the first cross street and walking rapidly away from Riverside Drive.

In the subway station Jimmie Dale read the letter—­read it twice over, as he always read those strange epistles of hers that opened the door to new peril, new danger to the Gray Seal, but too, that seemed somehow to draw tighter, in a glad, big way, the unseen bond between them; read it, as he always read those letters, almost subconsciously committing the very words to memory with that keen faculty of brain of his.  But now as he began to tear the sheet and envelope into minute particles, a strained, hard look was on his face and in his eyes, and his lips, half parted, moved a little.

“It’s a death warrant,” muttered Jimmie Dale.  “I—­I guess to-night will see the end of the Gray Seal.  She says I needn’t do it, but I guess it’s worth the risk—­a human life!”

A downtown express roared into the station.

“What time is it?” Jimmie Dale asked the guard, as he stepped aboard.

“’Bout midnight,” the man answered tersely.

The forward car was almost empty, and Jimmie Dale chose a seat by himself.  How did she know?  How did she know not only this, but the hundred other affairs that she had outlined in those letters of hers?  By what means, superhuman, indeed, it seemed, did she—­Jimmie Dale jerked himself erect suddenly.  What good did it do to speculate on that now, when every minute was priceless?  What was he to do, how was he to act, what plan could he formulate and carry out, and win against odds that, at the outset, were desperate enough even to forecast almost certain failure—­and death!

Who would ever have suspected old Tom Ludgate, known for years throughout the squalour of the East Side as old Luddy, the pushcart man, of having a bag of unset diamonds under his pillow—­or under the sack, rather, that he probably used for a pillow!  What a queer thing to do!  But then, old Luddy was a character—­apparently always in the most poverty-stricken condition, apparently hardly more than keeping body and soul together, trusting no one, and obsessed by the dread that by depositing in a bank some one would discover that he had money, and attempt to force it from him, he had put his savings, year after year, for twenty years, twenty-five years, perhaps, into unset stone—­diamonds.  How had she found that out?