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times during the night she turned on the narrow bed, moaning slightly. Once she woke up for a moment or two, her eyes wide and frightened and her pretty, heart-shaped face bathed in perspiration. She half sat up, her slender body tense, and then slowly sank back on the bed.
        She realized that she'd been having a nightmare and forced herself to again close her eyes. She slept then, the deep, quiet sleep of exhaustion, until sometime after daybreak.
        
***
        
        When Gerald Hanna made his decision as he sat there in the front seat of the Chevvie on that lonesome stretch of deserted road out on Long Island in the early hours of Saturday morning, it was a sharp and a sudden thing.
        It was seeing the fortune in stolen jewels glittering on the floor mat of the car in the dim rays cast by the dash light which triggered that decision. What brought it about, however, was a long series of events and circumstances which actually bore no relationship to the jewels or the method by which they had arrived at their present destination.
        To understand this decision, it is necessary to know something about and to understand Gerald Hanna himself. Gerald belonged to that class which is loosely and incorrectly referred to as the great middle class. A white collar worker, employed by an insurance firm as an actuary, his background and upbringing was as normal, as routine, as mediocre, as it would be possible to imagine. He'd graduated from high school, taken two years at a Midwestern state university, and come East. He'd had to find a job but had also wanted to finish his education. The job, as a mechanic in a garage, had enabled him to complete a second two-year course at a business school. Then he had gone to work for the insurance firm which had hired him directly upon his graduation.
        His college career had presaged his later business life. His marks had been average, he dabbled without distinction at a few extracurricular sports and activities. He didn't bother much with girls, coming from slightly poverty-stricken but respectable parents who had to strain themselves in order to see him through college at all. He was a normal, rather dull, thoroughly respectable, reliable and very average young man. He had neither unusual vices nor outstanding virtues. He was, in short, the stuff of which the backbone of the nation is made up.
        A hernia which bothered him not at all had kept him out of military service, for which he was vaguely grateful.
        At thirty, Gerald was a good-looking, medium-built young man who still had all of his hair and almost all of his teeth. He was beginning to believe that his eyes were getting a bit nearsighted and had recently been promising himself to find out if he would be needing glasses, at least for reading. He had normal taste, rather limited ambition (knowing the possibilities of an insurance actuary's career), and a sort of lingering desire to get married and settle down. He had met Maryjane Swiftwater at a house party given by one of the men who worked in his office, and they had been engaged for several years.
        He had known, for some time now, that there was something wrong with his life. But he didn't know quite what it was. Didn't know, except that he realized his job was dull, his activities were dull and that even the girl he planned and hoped to marry had herself become just a little dull with the passing of the waiting years.
        That evening he had taken a foolish chance when he had drawn to an inside straight. It wasn't a matter of the petty sum of money involved. It was a silly, ridiculous thing to do. As an actuary, he could figure percentages.
        But he had taken the chance and drawn to the inside straight and it had paid off.
        Now, here, lying at his feet, was a fortune in gems.
        Gerald's decision involved a second foolish chance. A chance contrary to every law of percentages. A truly insane