Madison, motionless, watched the Flopper disappear.  He wasn’t quite so calm now, not so cool and collected and composed.  He must go somewhere and think this out—­somewhere where it would be quiet and he wouldn’t be disturbed.

A step sounded on the path—­Madison looked through the trellis.  A man, with yellow, unhealthy skin and sunken cheeks, his head bowed, was passing in through the porch.  It caught Madison with fierce, exquisite irony.  Why not go there himself if he wanted quiet—­the shrine-room—­the place of meditation!  Well, he wanted to meditate!  He laughed jarringly.  The shrine-room—­for him!  Great!  Immense!  Magnificent!  Why not?  That’s what he had created it for, wasn’t it—­to meditate in!

He stepped inside.  The woman, whom he had seen enter a short while before, was sitting in a sort of rigid, strained attitude in the far corner; the man, who had just preceded him, had taken the chair by the fireplace—­they were the only occupants of the room.  There was no sound save his own footsteps—­neither of the others looked at him.  There was quiet, a profound stillness—­and the softened light from the shuttered window fell mellow all about, fell like a benediction upon the simplicity of the few plain articles that the room contained—­the round rag mats upon the white-scrubbed floor; the hickory chairs, severe, uncushioned; the table, with its little japanned box and book.

Madison’s eyes fixed upon the japanned box, as he leaned now, arms folded, against the wall—­a jewel, even in the subdued light, glowed crimson-warm where it nested on a crumpled bed of bank-notes—­a ruby ring—­the last contribution—­it must have been the woman who had placed it there.  Madison glanced at her involuntarily—­but his thoughts were far away again in a moment.

Anger and a blind rage of jealousy were gripping him now. Accident! The thought only fanned his fury.  Accident!  Yes; it was likely—­as an excuse!  There would have been an accident all right—­leave that to them!  Thornton perhaps wasn’t the stamp of man to seek an adventure of that kind deliberately—­perhaps he wasn’t—­and perhaps he was—­you never could tell—­but what difference did that make! Helena was that kind of a woman—­though he’d always thought her true to him since he’d known her—­and Thornton, whatever kind of a man he was, wouldn’t run away from her arms, would he?

The red glow from the ruby ring had vanished—­the man had risen from his seat and was placing something in the box on top of the ring—­Madison’s mind subconsciously absorbed the fact that it was a little sheaf of yellow-backed bills.  And now the man bent to the table and was writing in the book.

Yellow-backs and rubies!  Rubies and yellowbacks!  Madison’s lips thinned and curled downward at the corners.  Oh, it was coming all right, money, jewels, pelf, rolling in merrily every day, there wasn’t any stopping it, but he was paying for it, and paying for it at a price he didn’t like—­Helena.  Helena!  She wanted Thornton, did she—­with his money!  Wanted to dangle a millionaire on her string—­eh?  She’d throw him over—­would she!  And she thought she had him where he couldn’t lift a finger to stop it—­just sit back and grin like a poor, sick fool!