Lorelei gasped, for on the front page glared black-typed head-lines of the Hammon scandal.  John Merkle’s name was there, too and linked with it, her own.

“Jim!” she cried aghast.  “They promised to kill the story.”

“Humph!  Charley Murphy himself couldn’t kill that.”

“What is—­this?” She ran her eye swiftly down the column.

“Sure.  Melcher commenced suit against Hammon this afternoon.  Fifty thousand dollars for alienation of Lilas’s affections.  Joke, eh?  He claims there was a common-law marriage and he’ll get the coin.”

“But Mrs. Hammon?”

“The evidence is in her hands already—­dates, places, photographs, everything.  She’ll win her suit, too.”

“Why, it sounds like a—­a deliberate plot.  But I don’t understand who’s behind it.  What part did you have in it, Jim?  Were you helping Mr. Melcher in his blackmail scheme, or—­” Another possibility came to her—­“Were you by any chance working for Mrs. Hammon?”

Divining his sister’s prejudice, Jim lied promptly and convincingly.  “Why, Mrs. Hammon, of course.  I had a chance to turn a few dollars, and I took it.”

“But why did they drag me in?  Couldn’t you keep me out of it?  This is dreadful.”  As she ran her eye over the article she saw that it was quite in harmony with the general tone and policy of the paper which catered to the jaded throngs of the Tenderloin.  Truth had been cunningly distorted; flippancy, sensationalism, and a salacious double meaning ran through it all.

“What’s dreadful about it?” inquired her brother.  “That sort of advertising does a show-girl good.  You’ve got to make people talk about you, Sis, and this’ll bring a gang of high-rollers your way.  You’ve been so blamed proper that nobody’s interested in you any more.”

For a moment Lorelei scrutinized her brother in silence, taken aback at his outrageous philosophy.  Jim had changed greatly, she mused; not until very lately had she observed the full measure of the change in him.  He was no longer the country boy, the playmate and confidant of her youth, but a man, sophisticated, hard, secretive.  He had been thoroughly Manhattanized, she perceived, and he was as foreign to her as a stranger.  She shook her head hopelessly.

“You’re a strange brother,” she said.  “I hardly know what to make of you.  Has the city killed every decent instinct in you, Jim?”

“Now don’t begin on the Old Home stuff,” he replied, testily.  “I haven’t changed any more than you have.  Why, ma used to think you’d play dead or jump through whenever she snapped her finger, but—­you’re getting tough-bitted.  You’re getting sanctimonious in your old age.  Where you got it from I don’t know—­not from ma, surely, nor from dad; he’s a cheater and always has been.”

“Jim!”

“Oh, you know it.  I’m wondering—­how long you’ll stand pat.”

“What do you mean?”