till Martia was due back from her mother's. Had its starved yowling attracted the attention of outsiders, the whole show might have been given away!
He called it softly, "Puss, puss, puss. Here, puss."
Green eyes glowed dimly at him from the living-room doorway, where Martia had stood. But the cat stayed stubbornly there. The thing had always disliked him.
"Puss, puss!"
The green eyes moved a little, but moved away instead of toward him. Opper felt an insane desire to shriek laughter. To stand here calling a cat after what had happened! . . .
A choking sob of fear and rage gagged him an instant later. He cursed the dim green eyes in a harsh, strangling whisper. Then he calmed. He drew his pocket-knife out and threw it. The knife landed behind the cat, in the hall. The animal whimpered again, and Opper saw a dim shadow streak out the side door.
He staggered with relief, and felt for his knife in the hall till he found it. He went to the side door, closed and locked it, and stepped to the vague bulk which was the sedan. Quickly he slammed down the lid of the trunk and locked it.
He got into the car and released the emergency brake. The drive to his house sloped down a little to the street. He coasted down the slope, silent as a shadow, and rolled nearly half a block before his momentum died. Then, with all need for silence past, he started the motor and purred softly down the street toward the state highway.
But before he left the city limits, he stopped his sedan beside a corner curbing. He took the trunk key from his key ring and dropped it down the sewer grating there, with a rasping sigh tearing from his lips as it tinkled to oblivion.
Now he was completely, utterly safe.
2
In the pink light of early morning, Opper drove at a modest speed along the broad concrete fifty miles from his home. He kept the speedometer needle under the forty-five-mile mark primarily because being arrested for speeding was a thing too fraught with risk to contemplate without a shudder, but secondarily because the even, effortless pace gave him a chance to relax and rest.
Visions of Lois filled his brain now, as he rolled smoothly farther and farther from danger.
Lois in a tennis frock, throat bared, amber eyes gazing provocatively at him. Lois in that cloth-of-gold thing she'd worn last week at the supper club, with men clustering around her like flies around honey. Lois placing her hands lightly on his cheeks and saying:
"You're thrilling, my darling, but you have a wife. And I won't be anything to you—but wife."
Lois! Wealthy, beautiful, ruthlessly passionate but ruthlessly determined only on marriage!
Opper's hands tightened on the steering-wheel.
If Martia only had used sense! But she hadn't. She had grown hysterical when divorce was even mentioned. So he'd had to pack her off to her mother's house, with a vague idea in mind of how to get Lois anyhow. And he'd had to call her home again with definite, crystallized plans in his mind.
And now it was done. In the metal trunk on the rack behind him the Martia who had hysterically refused to lis-
