CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
FATHER AND SON While Mr.Gilmore was an exceedingly capable accomplice, at once resourceful, energetic, unsentimental and conscienceless, he yet combined with these solid merits, certain characteristics which rendered uninterrupted intercourse with him a horror and a shame to Marshall Langham who was daily and almost hourly paying the price the gambler had set on his silence.

And what a price it was! Gilmore was his master, coarse, brutal, and fiercely exacting.

How he hated him, and yet how necessary he had become; for the gambler never faltered, was never uncertain; he met each difficulty with a callous readiness which Langham knew he himself would utterly have lacked.

He decided this was because Gilmore was without imagination, since in his own many fearful, doubting moments, he saw always what he had come to believe as the inevitable time when the wicked fabric they were building would collapse like a house of cards in a gale of wind, and his terrible secret would be revealed to all men.
All this while, step by step, Gilmore, without haste but without pause, was moving toward his desires.

He came and went in the Langham house as if he were master there.
When Marshall had first informed Evelyn that he expected to have Mr.
Gilmore in to dinner, there had been a scene, and she had threatened to appeal to the judge; but he told her fiercely that he would bring home whom he pleased, that it suited him to be decent to Andy and that was all there was to it.