Strange scene!  Strange antithesis indeed!  It was quiet here—­very still—­only the distant, muffled boom of the pounding surf.  And the shrine-room, for the first time since its creation, was locked against the night.  It lay now in shadow from the single lamp upon the table—­and the light, where it fell in a shortened circle, for the lamp itself had a little green paper shade, was soft, subdued and mellow.

Where he had been wont to sit in the days gone by, the Patriarch sat now in his armchair by the empty fireplace—­in the shadow—­his head turned in his strange, listening, attentive way toward the table—­toward the four who were grouped around it.  There had been no one to stay with him in his own room, and so Helena had brought him there—­to play his silent part.

At the table, Pale Face Harry, bronzed and rugged, clear-eyed, a robust figure from his clean living, his months of the out-of-doors, traced the grain of the wood on the table mechanically with his finger nail, his face sober, perplexed; while the Flopper, clear-eyed too, his face almost a handsome one in its bright alertness, now that it had rounded out and the hard, premature lines were gone, mirrored Pale Face Harry’s perturbed expression, his eyes fixed anxiously on Madison opposite him; and Helena, sitting beside Madison, was very quiet, her forehead wrinkled and pursed up into little furrows, the brown eyes with a hint of dismay and consternation lurking in their depths, one hand stretched out to lay quite unconsciously on Madison’s sleeve—­and from the sleeve to steal occasionally into Madison’s hand.

Madison, his lips tight, pushed back his chair suddenly—­they had been sitting there an hour.

“You were right, Helena,” he said, with a nervous laugh.  “The more you try to figure it out the worse it gets.”

“Aw, say, Doc,” pleaded the Flopper desperately, “don’t youse give it up—­youse have got de head—­youse ain’t never left us in a hole yet.”

Madison looked at him, and smiled mirthlessly.

“My head!” he exclaimed bitterly.  “I got you into this, all of you—­but it will take more than my head to get you out.  If I could stand for it myself, I’d do it—­but I can’t without dragging you in too—­we’re too intimately mixed up.  If I said it was a deal of mine—­they’d ask where Helena came from—­they’d ask where you came from, Flopper.  We’re beaten—­beaten every way we turn.  The game has got us—­we haven’t a move.  We played it to the limit, the slickest swindle that was ever worked, and it worked till there’s more money than I’ve tried to count.  And then it changed us from thieves, from—­from anything you like—­and now that we want to quit, now that we want a chance to make good, it’s got us in its grip and we can’t get away.”  He flirted a bead of moisture from his forehead.  “My God, I don’t know what to do!” he muttered hoarsely.  “It was easy enough to talk about stopping this thing, about returning the money—­but I can’t see the way out.”