But the captain pointed to the locked door and bade them break it down.  In a few moments they demolished it with the axes they carried.  Into the other room sprang Claude Turpin, with the captain at his heels.

The scene was one that lingered long in Turpin’s mind.  Nearly a score of women—­women expensively and fashionably clothed, many beautiful and of refined appearance—­had been seated at little marble-topped tables.  When the police burst open the door they shrieked and ran here and there like gayly plumed birds that had been disturbed in a tropical grove.  Some became hysterical; one or two fainted; several knelt at the feet of the officers and besought them for mercy on account of their families and social position.

A man who had been seated behind a desk had seized a roll of currency as large as the ankle of a Paradise Roof Gardens chorus girl and jumped out of the window.  Half a dozen attendants huddled at one end of the room, breathless from fear.

Upon the tables remained the damning and incontrovertible evidences of the guilt of the habituees of that sinister room—­dish after dish heaped high with ice cream, and surrounded by stacks of empty ones, scraped to the last spoonful.

“Ladies,” said the captain to his weeping circle of prisoners, “I’ll not hold any of yez.  Some of yez I recognize as having fine houses and good standing in the community, with hard-working husbands and childer at home.  But I’ll read ye a bit of a lecture before ye go.  In the next room there’s a 20-to-1 shot just dropped in under the wire three lengths ahead of the field.  Is this the way ye waste your husbands’ money instead of helping earn it?  Home wid yez!  The lid’s on the ice-cream freezer in this precinct.”

Claude Turpin’s wife was among the patrons of the raided room.  He led her to their apartment in stem silence.  There she wept so remorsefully and besought his forgiveness so pleadingly that he forgot his just anger, and soon he gathered his penitent golden-haired Vivien in his arms and forgave her.

“Darling,” she murmured, half sobbingly, as the moonlight drifted through the open window, glorifying her sweet, upturned face, “I know I done wrong.  I will never touch ice cream again.  I forgot you were not a millionaire.  I used to go there every day.  But to-day I felt some strange, sad presentiment of evil, and I was not myself.  I ate only eleven saucers.”

“Say no more,” said Claude, gently as he fondly caressed her waving curls.

“And you are sure that you fully forgive me?” asked Vivien, gazing at him entreatingly with dewy eyes of heavenly blue.

“Almost sure, little one,” answered Claude, stooping and lightly touching her snowy forehead with his lips.  “I’ll let you know later on.  I’ve got a month’s salary down on Vanilla to win the three-year-old steeplechase to-morrow; and if the ice-cream hunch is to the good you are It again—­see?”