It would be a strange burglary that he had decided upon, in order that he might not fail her--stranger than any the Gray Seal had ever committed, and, in some respects, even more perilous! He started along the Bowery, walking briskly now, toward the nearest subway station, at Astor Place, his mind for the moment electing to face the situation in a humour as whimsical as his smile.

Supposing that, as Larry the Bat, he were caught and arrested during the next hour, in Jimmie's Dale's residence on Riverside Drive! With his arrest as Larry the Bat, Jimmie's Dale would automatically disappear.

Would follow then the suspicion that Jimmie Dale, the millionaire, had met with foul play, and as time went on, and Jimmie Dale, being then in prison as Larry the Bat, did not reappear, the assurance of it; then the certainty that suspicion would focus on Larry the Bat as being connected with the millionaire's death, since Larry the Bat had been caught in Jimmie Dale's home--and he would be accused of his own murder! It was quite humourous, of course, quite grotesquely bizarre--but it was equally an exceedingly grim possibility! There were drawbacks to a dual personality! "In a word," confided Jimmie Dale softly to himself, and a serious light crept into the dark, steady eyes, "I'm in a bit of a nasty mess!" At Astor Place he entered the subway; at Fourteenth Street he changed to an express, and at Ninety-sixth Street he got out.

It was but a short walk west to Riverside Drive, and from there his house was only a few blocks farther on.
Jimmie Dale did not slouch now.

And for all his disreputable attire, incongruous as it was in that neighbourhood, few people that he passed paid any attention to him, none gave him more than a casual glance--Jimmie Dale swung along, upright, with no attempt to make himself inconspicuous, hurrying a little, as one intent upon a definite errand.