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 Just as I'm not a man: I'm a crook. We're equals, sexless, soulless. You seem to have overlooked that. Amateurs often do. … To-night I made you a fair proposition, to play square with me and profit. You chose to be haughty. Now you see the other side of the picture."

Bravado? Or deadly purpose? How could she tell? Her heart misgave her; she crushed herself away from him as from some abnormally vicious, loathly reptile.

He understood this; and regarded her with a confident leer, inscrutably strong and malevolent.

"And there is one other reason why you will think twice before making a row," he clinched his case. "If you did that, and I weakly permitted the police to nab and walk us off, the business would get in the papers—your name and all; and—what'd Maitland think of you then, my lady? What'd he think when he read that Dan Anisty had been pinched on Broadway in company with the little woman he'd been making eyes at—whom he was going, in his fine manlike way, to reach down a