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"Look at Monte Carlo here! Of course it is. It's more crowded, more rapid; it holds more romance. We didn't put it all off, you know, with doublet and hose!" "No, of course not," answered Durkin absently. Life, at that moment, was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromising in its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it.
It surprised him a little, as he held her, to find that the woman was not inebriate. "I want this woman!" cried Durkin, and at the sound of his voice MacNutt leaned forward from the shadows of the half-closed carriage, and the eyes of the two men met, in one pregnant and contending stare. A flash of inspiration came to the trembling woman.
It was not until his eyes met hers that he took three wavering and undecided steps toward her. With a silent movement more of warning than of fright, he afterward told himself she pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. What her intent eyes meant to say to him, in that wordless, telepathic message, Durkin could not guess; all thought was beyond him.
"Shut up! She'll get on!" And Frank could hear them tear and haul at Durkin as they dragged him down the hall just where, she could not distinguish. She ran over to Keenan and shook him roughly. He looked at her a little stupidly, but did not seem able to respond to her entreaties. "Quick!" she whispered, "or it will be too late!"
As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more stepped out of the brilliantly lighted theatre, into the balmy night air, a seductive mingling of perfumes and music and murmuring voices blew in their hot faces, like a cooling wave. Durkin was wondering, a little wearily, just when he could be alone again.
Leaning back in the cushioned gloom, inert, impassive, with her eyes half-closed, she seemed to be drifting through an eddying veil of gray. The voices so close beside her sounded thin and far off. An impression of unreality clung to her, an impression that she was floating through an empty and rain-swept world from which all life and warmth had withered. "It's not her I want it's Durkin!"
The sound came to an end, and Durkin was assuring himself that it could now be neither Pobloff nor the valet, when a second sound sent a tingle of apprehension through his frame. It was the blue spurt of a match that suddenly cut the blackness before him. The fool he was striking a light! Durkin crouched lower, and watched the flame as it grew on the darkness.
Durkin, with little beads of sweat on his pallid face, realized what it meant. That flying shot had been intended for him. MacNutt, in that desperate and hurried and unreasoning last chance, had delivered his blow, but had been mistaken in his man!
You're sure it was Sawyer who came out?" "Of course I'm sure. He let out a yell and picked himself up and began to scold. Wanted to know what I meant by it and I said I was sticking a note under your door and he said 'Oh! and something about wanting to see you and waiting for you. Then he said he guessed you weren't coming back yet and he'd go on." "What time was this, Durkin?"
MacNutt, narrowly watching the shadowy face of Durkin, saw pictured on that pallid and changing countenance fear and revolt, one momentary touch of despairing doubt, and then a mounting and all-consuming passion of blind rage. In that drunken rage seemed to culminate all his misgivings, his suspicions, his apparent betrayals of the past.
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