Even worse to Jimmie Dale's artistic and sensitive temperament was the vilification, the holding up to loathing, contumely, and abhorrence of the name, the stainless name, of the Gray Seal.

It WAS stainless! He had guarded it jealously--as a man guards the woman's name he loves.
Affairs that had mystified and driven the police distracted with impotence there had been, many of them; and on the face of them--crimes.
But no act ever committed had been in reality a crime--none without the highest of motives, the righting of some outrageous wrong, the protection of some poor stumbling fellow human.
That had been his partnership with her.

How, by what amazing means, by what power that smacked almost of the miraculous she came in touch with all these things and supplied him with the data on which to work he did not know--only that, thanks to her, there were happier hearts and happier homes since the Gray Seal had begun to work.

"Dear Philanthropic Crook," she often called him in her letters.

And now--it was MURDER! Take Carruthers, for instance.