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A sharp report rang out into the chill crisp air, rousing all the affrighted echoes a few faltering steps, a heavy fall, and for a long time Emory Keenan's life-blood stained the floor of the promenade.
A notice to the bank in Papeete, Island of Tahiti, that you've given Captain Michael J. Murphy a letter of credit for twenty-five thousand dollars only one notice for one letter of credit. I'm up to skullduggery. Man, man, why don't you dictate? Usual courtesies good customer of your bank you know; usual flubdub. No advice regarding Miss Keenan's letter of credit just Murphy's."
But as she turned her startled eyes to him Keenan's last doubt as to whether or not it was a mere mistake withered away from his mind. He knew, from the hot flush that mounted to her cheeks and from the mellow contralto of her carefully modulated English voice, that she belonged to that vaguely denominated yet rigidly delimited type that would always be called a woman of breeding.
As Dundas sat and gazed at the girl's intent head, with its fleecy tendrils and its massive coil, the great hounds beside her, all emblazoned by the firelight upon the brown wall near by, with the vast fireplace at hand, the whole less like reality than some artist's pictured fancy, he knew naught of a sudden entrance, until she moved, breaking the spell, and looked up to meet the displeasure in Roxby's eyes and the dark scowl on Emory Keenan's face.
Oh, Jim, quick! he's killing him! I tell you he's killing him!" Durkin said "'Ssssh!" under his breath, and waited. For in the dim half-light they could see that the Russian had ripped open Keenan's coat and vest, and from a double-buttoned pocket on the inside of the inner garment was drawing out a yellow manila envelope, the fellow to that which had already been thrust into his hands.
She had not been altogether amiss in her predictions of what the past fortnight would bring forth. She had erred a little, she felt, in her estimate of Keenan's character; yet she had not been mistaken in the course of action which he was to pursue.
Yet rather than it should end in that slow and mean and sordid inner tragedy of the spirit, she told herself fiercely, she would fling open her last arsenal of passion and come to her end in some ironic blaze of glory that would at least lend sinister radiance to a timelessly base and sorry eclipse. So she lay back in Keenan's clasp quiescently, unresistingly, but watchfully.
When criminality went allied with a shrewd mind and a sound judgment and a smile curled about Keenan's melancholy Celtic mouth as he spoke it became transplanted, practically, to the sphere and calling of high finance.
Another door gave on an inner gallery, and through its floor a staircase came up from the quadrangle close to the threshold. Dundas wondered if these features were of possible significance in Keenan's estimation. The young mountaineer turned suddenly, and snatching up a handful of slats broken from the shutters, remarked: "Let's see how the chimbly draws that's the main p'int."
"But I am giving you a chance," Keenan next replied, and his long, melancholy Celtic face was white and colorless with emotion. "I'm giving you the only chance that life holds for both of us!" "I know it!" said the woman. Keenan's arms went out to her, and she did not draw back.
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