“Ah. Well now, as a young man gets older, he raises a family, takes on responsibilities. And then he changes—it’s only human nature. You see it on the street all the time. The man with responsibilities does not bet in the same way. His operations are different.”

“How different?”

Gabriel Love gazed at them both, and suddenly his pale blue eyes seemed to grow harder.

“He stacks the odds,” he said sharply.

He knew it. As Frank stared at the great, white, deceptive beard of Gabriel Love, every instinct told him it was time to leave.

Sean O’Donnell was one thing. Sean might kill you, but not if you were on his side. For some time, fate had linked them through Mary, and in other ways since. Sean he could trust. But Gabriel Love was another matter. Did he really want to get involved with him, at his time of life?

Master was nearly seventy-three years old. You wouldn’t have thought it to look at him—most people took him to be ten years younger. His hair was thin, and his mustache was white, but he was still a strong, good-looking man, and rather proud of it. He went to his counting house every day. And if, now and then, he felt a slight twinge of pain, or sense of tightness in the chest, he shrugged it off. If he was getting old, he didn’t want to know it.

But he enjoyed the respectability that his age and long career had earned him. His fortune was considerable, and he could easily augment it without taking unnecessary risks. He had his grandchildren to think of now. And Gabriel Love had just as good as told him that something dishonest was afoot. He started to rise.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I’m too old to go to jail.”

But Sean O’Donnell’s restraining hand was on his arm.

“Wait, Frank—for my sake—just hear what it is that Mr. Love proposes.”

It was a week later that Lily de Chantal set out in her carriage, from the distant north-western territory of the United States, to drive down to Gramercy Park.

Dakota Territory. Still not a state: a vast, wild wilderness. But when, a couple of years ago, Mr. Edward Clark the developer had built a huge, isolated apartment building on the west side of Central Park—all the way up at Seventy-second Street—he had decided to call it the Dakota. It seemed Mr. Clark had a fascination for Indian names. He’d already built another apartment house called the Wyoming, and had hoped to name one of the West Side boulevards Idaho Avenue. In its splendid isolation, with neighboring blocks empty except for a few small stores and shanties, the mighty Dakota might just as well have been in some remote territory, as far as the fashionable world was concerned.

“Nobody lives up there, for heaven’s sake,” they said. “And anyway, who lives in apartments?”