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Avenue, and beyond, while the cab followed cautiously. Then suddenly he turned in at the entrance of one of a row of apartment houses. By the time the cab approached he had disappeared within.
    Sherman ordered the driver to halt in front of the entrance, while a look of disappointment and chagrin covered his face. “Well, I’ll be hanged,” he said finally. “I thought sure I had him this time. And here he comes home to take a nap!”
    He sat undecided in a corner of the cab.
    “Hello, Sherman!” came a voice from above.
    Sherman, startled, leaned out through the cab door and looked up. Knowlton was leaning out of an open window on the second story of the apartment house he had entered, looking down with an amused grin.
    “Won’t you come up and have some tea?” he sang out pleasantly.
    Sherman’s face colored with rage.
    “No, thank you, Mr. John Norton ,” he called. Then he turned and shouted at the driver to go on, while his brain whirled with the thousand wild schemes of a baffled and enraged man.
    He, too, had noticed Lila’s preference for Knowlton. And he understood it, as Dumain did not; for the eyes of love are keen. He saw the uselessness of trying to combat that preference, for he recognized Knowlton’s superiority; but he hoped to acquire the power to force Knowlton to remove himself.
    He believed that he possessed the key to that power, and he had sought in many ways to verify his suspicions, but so far without success. He had begun by attempting a bluff. But Knowlton had called it, and it had failed.
    He had started a correspondence with friends in Warton. The information he obtained from them encouraged him; his suspicions were strengthened, but not confirmed. And he required evidence.
    Then he had shadowed Knowlton, and seemed ever on the verge of a discovery. But the proof he sought, though ever within his grasp, forever eluded him. He was at last almost persuaded to give it up as hopeless.
    He was filled with chagrin, disappointment, and despair, while the sight of Lila’s face and his desire for her spurred him on to renewed effort.
    Now, as he made his way back to the Lamartine, he resolved on a stroke in the open. He would enlist the services of the Erring Knights, at the same time blinding them as to his own designs.
    “They’re a bunch of fools, anyway,” he thought. “I think I’ll tackle the little Frenchman.”
    Accordingly, when he reached the Lamartine he called Dumain aside.
    “What do you want?” Dumain asked shortly.
    “I want to talk to you about Knowlton,” said Sherman.
    “What ees eet?”
    “I’ve discovered something about him that I think you ought to know—something not exactly to his credit.”
    Dumain stiffened.
    “Knowlton ees my friend,” he observed meaningly. “Go slow, Sherman.”
    “If that’s the way you feel about it I have nothing more to say,” said Sherman, turning to go. “Only I thought you were a friend of Miss Williams.”
    Dumain looked up quickly.
    “And so I am,” he declared. “But what is zee connection?”
    “Only this: That no one who is a real friend of Miss Williams can possibly be a friend of John Knowlton.”
    “And why?”
    “Because—well, I don’t think he intends to marry her.”
    “Mon Dieu!” Dumain gasped. “Has he been—”
    “No—not yet. But he will be. And she likes him too well already. Have you noticed what she does with the roses he gives her? And do you know how her eyes follow him all over the lobby?”
    “Well?”
    “Well, you know what that means. It means that Knowlton can do just about what he likes with her. If not now, it’ll come soon. And he’ll ruin her. Do you know anything about Knowlton? Listen:
    “His real name is Norton. One year ago he was cashier in a bank in a little town in Ohio. One morning they find the safe robbed—dynamited. They couldn’t prove Norton was implicated, but everybody knew he was. He beat it to New York. That explains where he got his coin. Now you have