"It is peace or war, as you will have it! We three men have all the secrets of the past.

If you attempt, in the slightest degree, to annoy our principal, we will strike, and without mercy." As the defeated husband drove home along the leafy borders of the beautiful Central Park--the one lovely oasis in New York's scattered maze of brick and iron monstrosity--he saw his life lying sere and yellow around him, his bare uplands scorched before their time.
"Ruin, ruin," he murmured, and a craven fear now possessed him--a fear born of his ignorance of the awful remorse of the dying hours of the Croesus, the moneyed giant cut off in the midst of all his schemes! "How much do they know ?" he murmured.
Rage filled his stormy heart; he would have struck back as madly as the blind rattlesnake but for the craven fears which now assailed him.
"I must await my time for revenge," he muttered.

"One touch of publicity in this, and Senator Dunham would chase me out of America.
He must, at the last, protect me, if only to save himself." Stunned by the sudden onslaught of the girl whom he had supposed to be but a pliant, hoodwinked child, Ferris sat long pondering gloomily in his rooms at the Fifth Avenue, his head buried in his hands.
The weary hours passed in alternations of rage and despair.
Haggard-eyed Ferris sprang to the door in the early evening gloom, as a sharp knock roused him.

When Policeman Dennis McNerney entered, he gazed wonderingly at the young lawyer.
"What's come over you ?" demanded the officer.

"You have heard the news?
I did not dare to go up to the office, and so I waited till you had finished your dinner." Ferris wearily gazed at his visitor.