[Frontispiece: "She turned with a start, though her loss ofself-possession lasted but a moment. "]

PHANTOM WIRES

A Novel

BY

ARTHUR STRINGER

Author of "The Wire Tappers, " "The Loom of Destiny, " etc. 

ILLUSTRATED BY

ARTHUR WILLIAM BROWN

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

Copyright, 1908, BY ARTHUR STRINGER. 

Copyright, 1907, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 

All Rights Reserved. 

 I

 _It's the bad that's in the best of us Leaves the saint so like the rest of us: It's the good in the darkest curst of us Redeems and saves the worst of us. _

 II

 _It's the muddle of hope and madness, It's the tangle of good and badness, It's the lunacy linked with sanity, Makes up and mocks Humanity!_

 A. S. 

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

 I. THE END OF THE TETHER II. THE AZURE COAST III. THE SHADOWING PAST IV. THE WIDENING ROAD V. THE GREAT DIVIDE VI. THE WOMAN SPEAKS VII. OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY VIII. "FOREIGNERS ARE FOOLS" IX. THE LARK IN THE RUINS X. THE TIGHTENING COIL XI. THE INTOXICATION OF WAR XII. THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE XIII. "THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR" XIV. AWAKENING VOICES XV. WIRELESS MESSAGES XVI. BROKEN INSULATION XVII. THE TANGLED SKEIN XVIII. THE SEVERED KNOT XIX. THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST XX. THE SPIDER AND THE FLY XXI. THE PIT OF DESPAIR XXII. THE ENTERING WEDGE XXIII. THE WAKING CIRCUIT XXIV. THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT XXV. THE RULING PASSION XXVI. THE CROWN OF IRON XXVII. THE STRAITS OF CHANCE XXVIII. THE HUMAN ELEMENT XXIX. THE LAST DITCH XXX. ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE

PHANTOM WIRES

CHAPTER I

THE END OF THE TETHER

Durkin folded the printed pages of the newspaper with no outward signof excitement. Then he took out his money, quietly, and counted it, with meditative and pursed-up lips. 

His eyes fell on a paltry handful of silver, with the dulled gold ofone worn napoleon showing from its midst. He remembered, suddenly, that it was the third time he had counted that ever-lightening handfulsince partaking of his frugal coffee and rolls that morning. So hedropped the coins back into his pocket, dolefully, one by one, and tookthe deep breath of a man schooling himself to face the unfaceable. 

Then he looked about the room, almost vacuously, as though theold-fashioned wooden bed and the faded curtains and the blank wallsmight hold some oracular answer to the riddle that lay before him. Then he went to the open window, and looked out, almost as vacuously, over the unbroken blue distance of the Mediterranean, trembling intosoft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowinginto a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening, again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to thesouthward where the twin tranquilities of sky and water met. 

It was the same unaltering Mediterranean, the same expanse of eternalsapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in andday out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the sameforlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week byweek seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft, exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with a little gestureof impatience. The movement was strangely like that of a feverishinvalid turning from the ache of an opened shutter. 

Durkin took up the newspaper once more, and unfolded it with listlesslyfebrile fingers. It was the Paris edition of "The Herald, " four daysold. Still again, and quite mechanically now, he read the familiaradvertisement. It was the same message, word for word, that had firstcaught his eye as he had sipped his coffee in the little palm-growngarden of the Hotel Bristol, in Gibraltar, nearly three weeks before. "Presence of James L. Durkin, electrical expert, essential at office ofStephens & Streeter, patent solicitors, etc. , Empire Building, New YorkCity, before contracts can be culminated. Urgent. "

Only, at the first reading of those pregnant words, all the even andhopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane of life had suddenlyerupted into one towering and consuming passion for activity, forreturn to his old world with its gentle anaesthesia of ever-wideningplans and its obliterating and absolving years of honest labor. 

He would never forget that moment, no matter into what ways or moodslife might lead him. The rhythmic pound and beat of a company ofBritish infantry, swarthy and strange-looking in their neutral-tintedkhaki, marched briskly by on the hard stone road, momentarily fillingthe garden quietnesses with a tumult of noise. A bugle had soundedfrom one of the fortified galleries high above him, had sounded clearlyout across the huddled little town at the foot of the Rock, challenging, uncompromising, thrillingly penetrating, as the paper hadfluttered and shaken in his fingers. He had accepted it, in that firstmoment of unreasoning emotionalism, as an auspicious omen, as the callof his own higher life across the engulfing abysses of the past. Hehad forgotten, for the time being, just where and what he was. 

But that grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, afterhe had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed tohim a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandishtongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, pastMoorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, infinal and frenzied search of the American Consul. 

He had found the Consulate, at last, on what seemed a back street ofthe Spanish quarter, a gloomy and shabby room or two, with the fadedAmerican flags over the doorway clutched in the carven claws of a stillmore faded eagle. And he had waited for two patient hours, enduringthe suspicious scowls of a lean and hawk-like Spanish housekeeper, todiscover, at the end, that the American Consul had been riding athounds, with the garrison Hunt Club. And when the Consul, having dulychased a stunted little Spanish fox all the way from Legnia toAlgeciras, returned to his official quarters, in Englishriding-breeches and irradiating good spirits, Durkin had seen hisnew-blown hopes wither in the blossom. The Consul greatly regrettedthat his visitor had been kept waiting, but infinitely greater was hisregret that an official position like his own gave him such limitedopportunity for forwarding impatient electrical inventors to theirnative shores. No doubt the case was imminent; he was glad his visitorfelt so confident about the outcome of his invention; he had known aman at home who went in for that sort of thing--had fitted up thelights for his own country house on the Sound; but he himself had neverdreamed such a thing as a transmitting camera, that could telegraph apicture all the way from Gibraltar to New York, for instance, was evena possibility! . . . The Department, by the way, was going to have acruiser drop in at Mogador, to look into the looting of the MethodistMissionary stores at Fruga. There was a remote chance that thiscruiser might call at the Rock, on the homeward journey. But it wasproblematical. . . . And that had been the end of it all, theignominious end. And still again the despairing Durkin was beingconfronted and challenged and mocked by this call to him from half wayround the world. It maddened and sickened him, the very thought of hishelplessness, so Aeschylean in its torturing complications, so ironicin its refinement of cruelty. It stung him into a spirit of blindrevolt. It was unfair, too utterly unfair, he told himself, as hepaced the faded carpet of his cheap hotel-room, and the mild Rivierasunlight crept in through the window-square and the serenely soft andalluring sea-air drifted in between the open shutters. 

It meant that a new and purposeful path had been blazed through thetangled complexities of life for him, yet he could make no move to takeadvantage of it. It meant that the door of his delivery had been swungwide, with its mockery of open and honest sunlight, and yet his feetwere to remain fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to hate. He must still stay an unwilling prisoner in this garden of studiedindolence, this playground of invalids and gamblers; he must stilldawdle idly about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing acrowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-fed and poorly housedabout this opulent showplace of the world that set its appeasingtheatricalities into motion only at the touch of ready gold. 

Durkin remembered, at that moment, that he was woefully hungry. Healso remembered, more gratefully, that the young Chicagoan, the lonelyand loquacious youth he had met the day before in the _café_ of the"_Terrasse_, " had asked him to take dinner with him, to view thesplendor of "_Ciro's_" and a keeper of the _vestiaire_ in scarletbreeches and silk stockings. Afterwards they were to go to the littlebon-bon play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino. He wasto watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate, flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung tremblingon the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was better thanmoping alone, he told himself. He hated loneliness. And until thelast few weeks he had scarcely known the meaning of the word! Therehad always been that other hand for which to reach, that other shoulderon which to lean! And suddenly, at the sting of the memories thatsurged over him, he went to the window that opened on its world of seaand sunlight, and looked out. His hands clutched the sill, and hisunhappy eyes were intent and inquiring, as they swept the world beforehim in a slow and comprehensive gaze. 

"_Wherever you wait, wherever you are, in all this wide world, Frank, come here, to me, now, now, for I want you, need you!_"

His lips scarcely murmured the vague invocation; it was more aninarticulate wish phrasing itself somewhere in the background of hisclouded brain. 

But as he awoke to the tumult of his emotions, to the intensity of hisattitude, whilst he stood there projecting that vague call out intospace, he turned abruptly away, with the abashment of a reticent mandetected in an act of theatricality, and flung out of the room, downinto the crowded streets of Monte Carlo. 

CHAPTER II

THE AZURE COAST

As Durkin and the young Chicagoan once more stepped out of thebrilliantly lighted theatre, into the balmy night air, a seductivemingling of perfumes and music and murmuring voices blew in their hotfaces, like a cooling wave. Durkin was wondering, a little wearily, just when he could be alone again. 

A group of gay and laughing women, with their aphrodisiac rustle ofsilk and flutter of lace, floated carelessly past. 

"Who are _they_?" asked the youth. 

Durkin half-envied him his illusions and his ingenuousness of outlook;he was treading a veritable amphitheatre of orderly disordered passionswith the gentle objective stare of a child looking for bright-coloredflowers on a battleground. Durkin wondered if, after all, it was notthe result of his mere quest of color, of his studying art in Paris fora year or two. 

"I wonder who and what they are?" impersonally reiterated the youngerman, as his gaze still followed the passing group to where it driftedand scattered through the lamp-strewn garden, like a cluster of goldenbutterflies. 

"Those are the slaves who sand the arena!" retorted Durkin, studyingthe softly waving palms, and leaving the other a little in doubt as tothe meaning of his figure. 

The younger man sighed; he was beginning to feel, doubtless, from whatdifferent standpoints they looked out on life. 

"Oh, well, you can say what you like, but this is the centre of theworld, to _my_ way of thinking!"

"The centre of--putrescence!" ejaculated Durkin. The younger man beganto laugh, with conciliatory good-nature, as he glanced appreciativelyback at the sweetmeat stateliness of the Casino front. But into theolder man's mind crept the impression that they were merely passing, ingoing from crowded theatre to open garden and street, from oneplayhouse to another. It all seemed to him, indeed, nothing more thana transition of theatricalities. For that outer play-world which layalong Monaco's three short miles of marble stairway and villa andhillside garden appeared to him, in his mood of settled dejection, asartificial and unnatural and unrelated as the life which he had justseen pictured across the footlights of the over-pretty andmeringue-like little theatre. 

"Well, Monte Carlo's good enough for me, all right, all right!"persisted the young Chicagoan, as they made their way down thelamp-hung Promenade. And he laughed with a sort of luxuriouscontentment, holding out his cigarette-case as he did so. 

The older man, catching a light from the proffered match, said nothingin reply. Something in the other's betrayingly boyish laugh grated onhis nerves, though he paused, punctiliously, beside his chance-foundcompanion, while together they gazed down at the twinkling lights ofthe bay, where the soft and violet Mediterranean lay under a soft andviolet sky, and the boatlamps were languidly swaying dots of white andred, and the Promontory stood outlined in electric globes, like awoman's breast threaded with pearls, the young art-student expressedit, and the perennial, ever-cloying perfumes floated up from square andthicket and garden. 

There was an eternal menace about it, Durkin concluded. There wassomething subversive and undermining and unnerving in its veryatmosphere. It gave him the impression of being always under glass. It made him ache for the sting and bite of a New England north-easter. It screened and shut off the actualities and perpetuities of life ascompletely as the drop and wings of a playhouse might. Its sense ofcasual and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of aspinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessantcoquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape andsea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, itsprimordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, itsovercrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluringrestaurants on steep little boulevards--it was all a blind, Durkinargued with himself, to drape and smother the cynical misery of theplace. Underneath all its flaunting and waving softnesses life rangrim and hard--as grim and hard as the solid rock that lay so closebeneath its jonquils and violets and its masking verdure of mimosa andorange and palm. 

He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and newborn austerity ofspirit, as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paperroses or painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffledand mediate insult to intelligence. The too open and illicitinvitation of its confectionery-like halls, the insipidly emphaticpretentiousness of the Casino itself--Durkin could never quite decidewhether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building orof a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked--the tinsel glory, the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderlygaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvetof indolence--it all combined to fill his soul with a sense of hotrevolt, as had so often before happened during the past long and lonelydays, when he had looked up at the soft green of olive and eucalyptusand then down at the intense turquoise curve of the harbor fringed withwhite foam. 

Always, at such times, he had marveled that man could turn one ofearth's most beautiful gardens into one of crime's most crowded haunts. The ironic injustice of it embittered him; it left him floundering in asea of moral indecision at a time when he most needed some forlornbelief in the beneficence of natural law. It outraged hisincongruously persistent demand for fair play, just as the sight of thejauntily clad gunners shooting down pigeons on that tranquil and Edeniclittle grass-plot at the foot of the Promontory had done. 

For underneath all the natural beauty of Monaco Durkin had beencontinuously haunted by the sense of something unclean and leprous andcorroding. Under its rouge and roses, at every turn, he found theinsidious taint. 

And more than ever, tonight, he had a sense of witnessing Destinystalking through those soft gardens, of Tragedy skulking about itsregal stairways. 

For it was there, in the midst of those unassisting and enervatingsurroundings, he dimly felt, that he himself was to choose one of twostrangely divergent paths. Yet he knew, in a way, that his decisionhad already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast andcounted. He had been trying to sweep back the rising sea with a broom;he had been trying to fight down that tangled and tortuous past whichstill claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was toslip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed andgnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from thefirst, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find somesolacing thought in the fitness between the act and itsenvironment--here he could fling himself into an obliterating Niagara, not of falling waters, but of falling men and women. Yes, it was astage all prepared and set for the mean and sordid and ever recurringtragedy of which he was to be the puppet. For close about him seethedand boiled, as in no other place in the world, all the darker and moredespicable passions of humanity. He inwardly recalled the types withwhich his stage was embellished; the fellow puppets of that gilded andarrogant and idle world, the curled and perfumed princes, the waxed andwatching _boulevardiers_ side by side with virginal and unconsciousAmerican girls, pallid and impoverished grand dukes in the wake ofpainted but wary Parisians, stiff-mustached and mysterious Austriancounts lowering at doughty and indignant Englishwomen; bejeweled beysand pashas brushing elbows with unperturbed New England school-teachersastray from Cook's; monocled thieves and gamblers and princelings, jaded tourists and skulking parasites--and always the disillusioned andwaiting women. 

"That play got on your nerves, didn't it?" suddenly asked the lazy, half-careless voice at his side. Durkin and the young Chicagoan werein the musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up past the stands atthe sea-front the breath of the Mediterranean blew in their faces, fresh, salty, virile. 

"This whole place gets on my nerves!" said Durkin testily. Yes, hetold himself, he was sick of it, sick of the monotony, of the idleness, of the sullen malevolence of it all. It was gay only to the eyes; andto him it would never seem gay again. 

"Oh, that comes of not speaking the language, you know!" maintained theother stoutly, and, at the same time, comprehensively. 

He was still very young, Durkin remembered. He had toyed with art fortwo winters in Paris, so scene by scene he had been able to translatethe little drama that had appeared so farcical and Frenchy to his oldercountryman in exile. 

Durkin's lip curled a little. 

"No--it comes of knowing _life_!" he answered, with a touch ofimpatience. He felt the gulf that separated their two oddly diverselives--the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other afugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him. He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some gliband ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than truthitself. 

"Why, " he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in thatplay might happen here, tonight, to you or me!"

"Rubbish!" ejaculated Durkin, brusquely, remembering how lonely he mustindeed have been thus to attach himself to this youth of the studios. But he added, as a matter of form: "You think, then, that life today_is_ as romantic as it once was?"

"_Mon Dieu_!" cried the other. "Look at Monte Carlo here! Of courseit is. It's more crowded, more rapid; it holds _more_ romance. Wedidn'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 uncompromisingin its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it. 

"And a thing isn't romantic just because it's moss-grown!" continuedthe child of the studios, warming to his subject. "It's romantic whenwe've emotionalized it, when we've _felt_ it, when it's hit home withus, as it were!"

"If it doesn't hit too hard!" qualified the older man. 

"For instance, " maintained the young Chicagoan, once more profferinghis cigarette-case to Durkin, "for instance, take that big Mercedestouring-car with the canopy top, coming down through the crowd there. You'll agree, at first sight, that such things mean good-bye to themounted knight, to chivalry, and all that romantic old horsemanbusiness. "

"I suppose so. "

"But, don't you see, the horse and armor was only a frame, anaccidental setting, for the romance itself! It's up to date andpractical and sordid and commonplace, you'd say, that puffing thingwith a gasoline engine hidden away in its bowels. It's what we callmachinery. But, supposing, now, instead of holding Monsieur le DucSomebody, or Milord So-and-So, or Signor Comte Somebody-Else, with hiswife or his mistress--I say, supposing it held--well, my young sisterAlice, whom I left so sedately contented at Brighton! Supposing itheld my young sister, running away with an Indian rajah!"

"And you would call that romance?"

"Exactly!"

Durkin turned and looked at the approaching car. 

"While, as a matter of fact, " he continued, with his exasperatinglysmooth smile, "it seems to be holding a very much overdressed younglady, presumably from the Folies-Bergère or the Olympia. "

The younger man, looking back from his place beside him, turned tolisten, confronted by the sudden excited comments of a middle-agedwoman, obviously Parisian, on the arm of a lean and solemn man withdyed and waxed mustachios. 

"You're quite wrong, " cried the young Chicagoan, excitedly. "It'syoung Lady Boxspur--the new English beauty. See, they're crowding outto get a glimpse of her!"

"Who's Lady Boxspur?" asked Durkin, hanging stolidly back. He had seenquite enough of Riviera beauty on parade. 

"She's simply ripping. I got a glimpse of her this afternoon in frontof the _Terrasse_, after she'd first motored over from Nice with oldSzapary!" He lowered his voice, more confidentially. "This Frenchmanhere has just been telling his wife that she's the loveliest woman onthe Riviera today. Come on!"

Durkin stood indifferently, under the white glare of the electric lamp, watching the younger man push through to the centre of the roadway. The slowly-moving touring-car, hemmed in by the languid midnightmovement of the street, came to a full stop almost before where hestood. It shuddered and panted there, leviathan-like, and Durkin sawthe sea breeze sway back the canopy drapery. 

He followed the direction of the excited young Chicagoan's gaze, smilingly, now, and with a singularly disengaged mind. 

He saw the woman's clear profile outlined against the floating purplecurtain, the quiet and shadowy eyes of violet, the glint of thechestnut hair that showed through the back-thrust folds of the whitesilk automobile veil swathing the small head, and the nervous, bird-like movement of the head itself. 

He did not move; there was no involuntary, galvanic reaction; no suddengasp and flame of wonder. He simply held his cigarette still poised inhis fingers, half-way to his lips, with the minutest relaxing of thesmile that still hovered about them, while a dull and ashen graynesscrept into his face, second by waiting second. 

It was not until his eyes met hers that he took three wavering andundecided steps toward her. 

With a silent movement--more of warning than of fright, he afterwardtold himself--she pressed her gloved fingers to her lips. What herintent eyes meant to say to him, in that wordless, telepathic message, Durkin could not guess; all thought was beyond him. But in a moment ortwo the roadway cleared, the car shook and plunged forward, thefloating curtains fluttered and trailed behind. 

Durkin turned blindly, and pushed and ran and dodged through thelanguidly amazed promenaders, following after that sudden andbewildering vision, as after his last hope in life. But the fine, white, limestone Riviera dust from the fading car's tire-heels, and theburnt gases from its engines, were all the road held for him, as itundulated off into hillside quietnesses. 

He heard the young Chicagoan calling after him, breathless and anxious. But he ran on until he came to a side street, shadowed with gardenwalls and villas and greenery. Slipping into this, he immured himselfin the midnight silences, to be alone with the contending forces thattore at him. 

If his companion was right, and such things as this made up Romance, then, after all, the drama of life had lost none of its bewilderment. For the woman he had seen between the floating purple curtains was hisown wife. 

CHAPTER III

THE SHADOWING PAST

Durkin's first tangible feeling was a passion to lose and submergehimself in the muffling midnight silences, the silences of thoseoutwardly quiet gardens at heart so old in sin and pain. 

He felt the necessity for some sudden and sweeping readjustment, andhis cry for solitude was like that of the child wounded in spirit, orthat of the wild animal sorely hurt in body. Before he could face lifeagain, he felt, he had to build up about him the sustaining fabric ofsome new and factitious faith. 

But as intelligence slowly emerged from the mist and chaos of utterbewilderment, as reason crept haltingly back to her seat, his firstblind and indeterminate rage fell away from him. His first black andblinding clouds of suspicion slowly subsided before practical andorderly question and cross-question. Thought adjusted itself to itsnew environment. Painfully, yet cautiously, he directed his ceaselessartillery of interrogation toward the outer and darker walls ofuncertainty still so blankly confronting him. 

It was not that he had been consumed by any direct sense of loss, ofdeprivation. It was not that he had feared open and immediatetreachery. If a rage had burned through him, at the sudden andstartling sight of his own wife thus secretly masquerading in anunknown rôle, it was far from being a rage or mere jealousy anddistrust. 

They had, in other days, each passed through questionable and perilousexperiences. Both together and alone they had adventured unwillinglyalong many of the more dubious channels of life. They had surrenderedto temptation; they had sown and reaped and suffered, and become wearyof it. They had struggled slowly yet stoically up towardsrespectability; they had fought for fair-dealing; they had entered acompact to stand by each other through that long and bitter effort tobe tardily honest and autumnally aboveboard. 

What now so disturbed and disheartened him was the sudden sense ofsomething impending, the vague apprehension of some momentous andfar-reaching intrigue which he could not even foreshadow. And it wasframing itself into being at a time when he had most prayed for theiruntrammelled freedom, when he had most looked for their ultimateemancipation from the claws of that too usurious past. 

But, above all, what had brought about the sudden change? Why had noinkling of it crept to his ears? Why was she, the passionate pleaderfor the decencies of life whom he had last watched so patiently andheroically imparting the mastery of the pianoforte to seven littleEnglish children in a squalid Paris _pension_, now lapsing back intothe old and fiercely abjured avenue of irresponsibility? Why had sheweakened and surrendered, when he himself, the oldtime weakling of thetwo, had clung so desperately to the narrow path of rectitude? Andwhat was the meaning and the direction of it all? And what would itlead to? But why, above all, had she kept silent, and given him nowarning?

Durkin looked up and listened to the soft rustling of the palmbranches. The bray of a distant band saddened him with an unfathomablesense of homesickness. Through an air that seemed heavy with languidtropicality, and the waiting richness of life, he caught the belatedglimmer of lights and the throb and murmur of string music. It carriedin to him what seemed the essential and alluring note of all theexistence he had once known and lived. Yet day by day he had foughtback that sirenic call. It had not always been an open victory--theweight of all the past lay too heavily upon him for that--but for _her_sake he had at least vacillated and hesitated and temporized, waitingand looking for that final strength which would come with her firstwistful note of warning, or with her belated return to his side. 

Yet here was Opportunity lying close and thick about him; here Chancehad laid the board for its most tempting game. In that way, as theyoung Chicagoan had said, they stood in the centre of the world. Buthe had turned away from those clustering temptations, he had leftunbroken his veneer of honorable life, for her sake--while she herselfhad surrendered, unmistakably, irrevocably, whatever strange form thesurrender might even at that moment be taking. 

All he could do, now, was to wait until morning. There would surely besome message, some hint, some key to the mystery. While everythingremained so maddeningly enigmatic, he raked through the tangled past insearch of some casual seed of explanation for that still undecipheredpresent. 

He recalled, period by period, and scene by scene, his kaleidoscopicpast career, his first fatal blunder as a Grand Trunk telegraphoperator, when one slip of the wrist brought a gravel train head-oninto an Odd Fellows' Excursion special, his summary dismissal from therailroad, and his unhappy flight to New York, his passionate struggleto work his way up once more, his hunger for money and even a few weeksof leisure, that his long dreamed of photo-telegraphy apparatus mightbe perfected and duly patented, his consequent fall from grace in thePostal-Union offices, through holding up a trivial racing-return or twountil he and his outside confederate had been able to make theirillicit wagers, then his official ostracism, and his wanderingstreet-cat life, when, at last, the humbling and compelling pinch ofpoverty had turned him to "overhead guerrilla" work and the dangers andvicissitudes of a poolroom key-operator. He recalled his chancemeeting with MacNutt, the wire-tapper, and their partnership ofprivateer forces in that strange campaign against Penfield, the alertand opulent poolroom king, who had seemed always able to defy theefforts and offices of a combative and equally alert district-attorney. 

Most vividly and minutely of all, he reviewed his first meeting withFrances Candler, and the bewilderment that had filled him when hediscovered her to be an intimate and yet a reluctant associate withMacNutt in his work--a bewilderment which lasted until he himself grewto realize how easy was the downward trend when once the first falsestep had been made. 

He brought back to mind their strange adventures and perils and escapestogether, day by day and week by week, their early interest that hadripened into affection, their innate hatred of that underground life, which eventually flowered into open revolt and flight, their impetuousmarriage, their precipitate journey from the shores of America. 

Then came to him what seemed the bitterest memories of all. It was thethought of that first too fragile happiness which slowly but implacablymerged into discontent, still hidden and tacit, but none the lessevident. That interregnum of peace had been a Tantalus-like taste of adraught which he all along knew was to be denied him. Yet, point bypoint, he recalled their first quiet and hopeful weeks in England, whentheir old ways of life seemed as far away as the America they had leftbehind, when they still had unbounded faith in themselves and in thefuture. Just how or where fell the first corroding touch he couldnever tell. But in each of them there had grown up a secret unrest--itwas, he knew, the hounds of habit whimpering from their kennels. "Noone was ever reformed, " he had once confided to Frances, "by simplybeing turned out to grass!" So it was then that they had tried to drugtheir first rising doubts with the tumult of incessant travel andchange. His wife had lured him to secluded places, she had struggledto interest him in a language or two, she had planned quixotic coursesof reading--as though a man such as he might be remolded by a fewmonths of modern authors!--and carried him off to centres of gaiety--asthough the beat of Hungarian bands and outlandish dances could drivethat inmost fever out of his blood!

He endured Aix-les-Bains and its rheumatics, with their bridge-whistand late dinners and incongruous dissipations, for a fortnight. Thenthey fled to the huddled little hotels and _pensions_ of the narrow anddark wooded valley of Karlsbad, under skies which Frank declared to bebluer than the blue of forget-me-nots, where, amid Brahmins from Indiaand royalty from Austria and audacious young duchesses from Paris andstudents from Petersburg and Berlin, and undecipherable strangers fromall the remotest corners of the globe, it seemed to Durkin they were atlast alone. He confided this feeling to his wife, one tranquil morningafter they had drunk their Sprudel from long-handled cups, at thespring where the comely, rubber-garmented native girls caught and doledout the biting hot spray of the geyser. They were seated at theremoter end of the glass-covered Promenade, and a band was playing. Something in the music, for once, had saddened and dispirited Frank. 

"Alone?" she had retorted. "Who is ever alone?"

"Well, our wires are down, for a little while, anyway!" laughed Durkin, as he sipped the hot salt water from the china cup. It reminded him, he had said, of all his past sins in epitome. Frank sighed wearily, and did not speak for a minute or two. 

"But, after all, " she said at last, in a meditative calmness of voice, "there are always some sort of ghostly wires connecting us with oneanother, holding us in touch with what we have been and done, with ourpast, and with our ancestors, with all our forsaken sins and misdoings. No, Jim, I don't believe we are _ever_ alone. There are always soundsand hints, little broken messages and whispers, creeping in to us alongthose hidden circuits. We call them Intuitions, and sometimes we speakof them as Character, and sometimes as Heredity, and weakness ofwill--but they are there, just the same!"

The confession of that mood was a costly one, for before the week wasout they had, in some way, wearied of the sight of that dailyprocession of nephritics and neurotics, and were off again, like a pairof homeless swallows, to the Rhine salmon and the Black Forest venisonof Baden. From there they fled to the mountain air of St. Moritz, where they were frozen out and driven back to Paris--but alwaysspending freely and thinking little of the vague tomorrow. Durkin, indeed, recognized that taint of improvidence in his veins. He was aspendthrift; he had none of the temperamental foresight and frugalityof his wife, who reminded him, from time to time, and withever-increasing anxiety, of their ever-melting letter of credit. But, on the other hand, she stood ready to sacrifice everything, in order tobuild some new wall of interest about him, that she might immure himfrom his past. She still planned and schemed to shield him, not somuch from the world, as from himself. Yet he had seen, almost from thefirst, that their pursuit of contentment was born of their common andever-increasing terror of the future. Each left unuttered the actualemptiness and desolation of life, yet each nursed the bitter sting ofit. Day by day he had put on a bold face, because he had long sincelearned how poignantly miserable his own misery could make her. And, above all things, he hated to see her unhappy. 

CHAPTER IV

THE WIDENING ROAD

Under the softly-waving palms of that midnight garden, Durkin relivedtheir feverish past, month by remembered month, until they found theneed of money staring them in the face. He reviewed each increasingdilemma, until, eventually, he had left her in her squalid Parispension with her music pupils and the last eighty francs, while heclutched at the passing straw of an exporting house clerkship inMarseilles. The exporting house, which was under American guidance, had flickered and gone out ignominiously, and week by desperate weekeach new promise of honest work seemed to wither into a chimera at hisfeverish touch. He had been told of a demand for electrical experts atTangier, and had promptly worked his passage to that outlandishsea-port on a Belgian coasting-steamer, only to find a week'semployment installing a burglar-alarm system in the ware-house of aLiverpool shipping company. In Gibraltar, a week or two longer, he hadbeen able to supply his immediate wants through assisting in thereconstruction of a moving-picture machine, untimely wrecked on theoutskirts of Fez by Moorish fanatics who had believed it to be theinvention of the Evil One. 

It was at Gibraltar, too, that his first mocking hopes for some renewalof life had come to him, along with the vague hint that histransmitting camera had at last been recognized, and perhaps evenmarketed. But escape from that little seaport had been as difficult asescape from gaol. He had finally effected a hazardous andever-memorable migration from Algeciras to Cimiez, but only by actingas chauffeur for a help-abandoned, gout-ridden, and irritable-mindedex-ambassador to Persia, together with a scrupulously inattentivetrained nurse, who, apparently, preferred diamonds to a uniform, andsmuggled incredible quantities of hand-made lace under the tonneauseat-cushions. And then he had found himself at Monte Carlo, stillwaiting for word from Paris, fighting against a grim new temptationwhich, vampire-like, had grown stronger and stronger as its victimdaily had grown weaker and weaker. 

For along the sea-front, one indolent and golden afternoon, he hadlearned that an American yacht in the harbor was sending ashore for apractical electrician, since a defective generator had left its cabinsof glimmering white and gold in sudden darkness. Durkin, after a brieftalk with the second officer, had been taken aboard the tender andhurried out to where the lightless steamer rocked and swung at heranchor chain in the intense turquoise bay. He had hoped, at first, that he was approaching his ship of deliverance, that luck was favoringthe luckless and at last the means of his escape were at hand. So heasked, with outward unconcern, just what the yacht's course was. Theywere bound for Messina, the second officer had replied, and from therethey went on to Corfu for a couple of weeks, and then on to Ragusa. 

He went on board and looked over the armature core. It was of theslotted drum type, he at once perceived, built up of laminations ofsoft steel painted to break up eddy currents, and as he tested the softamber mica insulation about the commutators of hard-rolled copper, heknew that the defective generator could be repaired in three-quartersof an hour. But certain scraps of talk that came to his ears amid theclink of glasses, from one of the shadowy saloons, had stung into vagueactivity his old, irrepressible hunger for the companionship of his ownkind, his own race. 

It was uncommonly pleasant, he had told himself as he had caught thefirst drone of the lowered, confidential voices, to hear the old hometalk, and even broken snatches of old home interests. As he exploredthe ship and minutely examined automatic circuit-breaker andswitchboard and fuse, he even made it a point to see that hisexplorations took him into the pantry-like cabin next to the saloonfrom which these droning voices drifted. As he gave apparentlystudious and unbroken attention to a stretch of defective wiring, hewas in fact making casual mental note of the familiar tones of thedistant voices, listening impersonally and dreamily to each questionand answer and suggestion that passed between that quietly talkinggroup. One of the talkers, he soon found, was a Supreme Court judge onhis vacation, equable and deliberative in his occasional query or viewor criticism; another was apparently a secret agent from the office ofthe New York district-attorney, still another two were either ScotlandYard men or members of some continental detective bureau--this Durkinassumed from their broad-voweled English voices and their seeminglyintimate knowledge of European criminal procedure. The fifth man hecould in no way place. But it was this man who interrupted the others, and, apparently taking a slip of paper from some inside pocket or somewell-closed wallet, read aloud a list which, he first explained, hadbeen secured from some undesignated safe on the night of a certain raid. 

"Three hundred and twenty shares of National Bank of Commerce, " readthe voice methodically, the reader checking off each item, obviously, as he went along. "One certificate of forty-seven shares of UnitedStates Steel Preferred; two certificates of one hundred shares each ofErie Railroad First Preferred; eighteen personal cheques, with namesand amounts and banks attached; seven I. O. U. 's, with amounts anddates and initials. "

"Probably worthless, from our point of view!" interposed a voice. 

The dreaminess suddenly went out of Durkin's eyes, as he listened. 

"Postal-Union Telegraph bonds, valued at $102, 345, " went on the readingvoice, and again the interrupting critic remarked: "Which, you see, wemay regard as very significant, since it both obviously and inferablydemonstrates that the telegraph company and the poolrooms are compelledto stand together!"

Durkin followed the list, with inclined head and uplifted hands, forgetting even his simulation of work, until the end was reached. 

"In all, you see, one quarter of a million dollars in negotiablesecurities, if we are to rely on this memorandum, which, as I statedbefore, ought to be authentic, for it was taken from the Penfield safethe night of the first raid. "

Durkin started, as though the circuit with which his fingers absentlytoyed had suddenly become a live wire. 

"Penfield!" The word sent a little thrill through his body. Penfield--the very name was a challenging trumpet to him. But again hebent and listened to the drone of the nearby voices. 

"And Keenan, you say, is in Genoa?" asked one of the Englishmen. 

"If he's not there now he will be during the week, " answered theAmerican. 

"You're sure of that?"

"All I know is that our Milan man secured duplicates of his cables. Three of them were in cipher, but he was able to make reasonably sureof the Genoa trip!"

"It would be rather hard to get at him, _there_!"

"But if he strikes north, as you say, and goes first to Liverpool, andgets home by the back door, as it were, by taking a steamer to Quebecor Montreal----"

"That's a mere blind!"

"But why say that?"

"Because he's too wise to stride British territory, before he unloads. It's not a mere matter of stopping the transfer of this stock, orwhether or not all of it is negotiable. What we want is tangible andincriminating evidence. The signatures of those cheques are----"

That was the last word that came to Durkin's ears, for at that moment asteward, with a tray of glasses, hurried into the pantry. Hissuspicious eye saw nothing beyond a busy electrician replacing aswitchboard. But before the intruding steward had departed the secondofficer was at Durkin's elbow, overlooking his labors, and no furtherword or hint came to the ears of the listener. 

But he had heard enough. The flame had been applied to the dry acreageof his too arid and idle existence. He had remained passive too long. It was change that brought chance. And even though that change meantdescent, it would, after all, be only the momentary dip that precededthe upward flight again. And as he gazed thoughtfully landward, whereMonte Carlo lay vivid and glowing under the sheltering Alpes-Maritimes, like a golden lizard sunning itself on a shelf of gray rock, he feltwithin him a more kindly and comprehensive feeling for thatflower-strewn arena of vast hazards. It was, after all, the greatchances of life that made existence endurable. Its only anodyne lay ineffort and feverish struggle. And his chance for work had come!

Half an hour later he was rowed ashore, with a good Havana cigarbetween his teeth and three good English sovereigns in his pocket. Ashe made his way up to his hotel he could feel some inner part of himstill struggling and shrinking back from the enticing avenue ofactivity which his new knowledge was opening up before him. 

He smiled, now, a little grimly, as he sat under the rustling palms andthought of those old, unnecessary scruples. He had been holdinghimself to a compact which no longer existed. And, all along, he hadbeen regarding himself as the weakling, the vacillator, when it was hewho had held out the longest! He had even, in those earlier hesitatingmoments, consolingly recalled to his mind how Monsieur Blanc's modestlydenominated Société Anonyme des Bains de Mer et Cercle des Étrangersmade it a point to proffer a railway ticket to any impending wreck, such as himself, who might drift like a stain across its roads ofmerriment, or leave a telltale blot upon one of its perenniallybeautiful and ever-odorous flower-beds. But now, as he reviewed thosepast weeks of hesitation and inward struggle, a sense of relapse creptover him. As he recalled the picture of the clear-cut profile betweenthe floating purple curtains, a vague indifference as to the finaloutcome of things took possession of him. 

He almost exulted in the meaning of the strange meeting, which, onehour before, had seemed to bring the universe crashing down about hishead. Then, as his plans and thoughts took more definite shape, hisearlier recklessness merged into an almost pleasurable sense of reliefand release, of freedom after confinement. He felt incongruouslygrateful for the lash that had awakened him to even illicit activity;life, under the passion for accomplishment, under the zest for risk andresponsibility, seemed to take on its older and deeper meaning oncemore. It was, he told himself, as if the foreign tongue which he hadso wearily heard on every side of him, for so long, had suddenlytranslated itself into intelligibility, or as if the text beneath thepictures in those ubiquitous illustrated papers from Paris, which hehad studied so blankly and so blindly, had suddenly become as plain ashis own English to him. 

But his moment of exaltation, his mood of careless emancipation, was abrief one. He was no longer alone in life. His bitterness of hearthad blinded him to obligations. He had not yet fathomed the mystery ofFrank's appearance. He had not yet even made sure of her relapse. Above all, he had not put forth a hand to help her in what might be aninexplicable extremity. The morning could still bring some word fromher. He himself would spend the day in search of her. He would haveto proceed guardedly, but he would leave no stone unturned. It wasnot, he told himself, that he was giving fate one last chance to treatmore kindly with him. It was, rather, that all his natural beingwanted and reached out for this woman who had first taught him themeaning and purpose of life. . . . His mind went back, suddenly, toone afternoon, months before, at Abbazia, when they had come up fromsea-bathing in the Adriatic. He had leaned down over her, to help herup the Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-water. Themingled gold and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden withbrine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched andcolorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as sheleaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dimfuture, an adumbration of her own body grown frail and old, looking upto him for help, calling forlornly to him for solace. And in thatimpressionable moment his heart had gone out to her, in a burst of pitythat seemed deeper and stronger than love itself. 

CHAPTER V

THE GREAT DIVIDE

Durkin waited until, muffled and far away, the throb and drone of anorchestra floated up to him. This was followed, scatteringly, by thebells of the different _tables d'hôte_. They, too, sounded thin andremote, drifting up through the soft, warm air that had always seemedso exotic to him, so redolent of foreign-odored flowers, so burdenedwith alien-smelling tobacco smoke, of unfamiliar sea scentsincongruously shot through with even the fumes of an unknown andindescribable cookery. 

While that genial shrill and tinkle of many bells meant refreshment andmost gregarious frivolity for the chattering, loitering, laughing andever-spectacular groups so far below him--and how he hated theiroutlandish gibberish and their arrogant European aloofness!--it meantfor him hard work, and hard work of a somewhat perilous and stimulatingnature. 

For, as the last of the demurely noisy groups made their way throughthe deepening twilight to the different hotels and cafés that alreadyspangled the hillsides with scattering clusters of light, Durkin coollyremoved his shoes, twisted and knotted his two bath towels into a stoutrope, securely tied back his heavy French window-shutter of wood withone of his sheets, and having attached his improvised rope to the baseof the shutters, swung himself deftly out. On the return swing hecaught the cast-iron water-pipe that scaled the wall from window tierto window tier. Down this jointed pipe he went, gorilla-like, segmentby segment, until he reached what he knew to be the hotel's thirdfloor. Here he rested for a moment or two against the wall, feelinginwardly grateful that a Mediterranean climate still made possibleMonaco's primitive outside plumbing--to the initiated, he inwardlyremarked, such things had always their unlooked-for advantages. Healso felt both relieved and grateful to see that the two windowsbetween him and his destination had been left shuttered against theheat of the afternoon sun. The third window he could see, was not thusbarricaded, although, as he had expected, the sash itself was securelylocked. 

Once convinced of this, he dropped down, stealthily, and lay fulllength on the balcony flooring, with his ear close against the casementwoodwork, listening. Reasonably satisfied, he rose to his knees, andtook from his vest pocket a small diamond ring. Holding this firmlybetween his thumb and forefinger, he described a semi-circle on theheavy window-glass. He listened again, intently. Then he took a smallcold-chisel from still another pocket, and having cut away the putty atthe base of the semicircle, smote the face of the glass one sharplittle tap. 

It cracked neatly, along the line of the circling diamond-scratch, sothat, with the help of a suction cap made from the back of a kid glove, he was able to draw out the loosened segment of glass. Then he waitedand listened still again. As he thrust in through the little opening acautiously exploring hand the casual act seemed to take on the dignityof a long-considered ritual. It was a ceremonial moment to him, hefelt, for it marked his transit, across some narrow moral divide, fromlonely ascent to lonely decline. 

The impression stayed with him only a second. He turned back to hiswork, with a reckless little up-thrust of each resolute shoulder. Hissearching fingers found the old-fashioned window lever, of hammeredbrass, and on this he pressed down and back, quietly. A moment laterthe sash swung slowly out, and he was inside the room, closing theshutters and then the window after him. 

He stood there, in the dark quietness, for what must have been a fullminute. Then he took from his pocket a box of wax matches. He hadpurchased them for the purpose, from the frugal old woman who month bymonth and season by season carried on her quiet trade at the foot ofthe Casino steps, catching, as it were, the tiny drippings from theflaring tapers in that Temple of Gold. And day after day, one turn ofthe roulette wheel took and gave more money than all her years offrugal trade might amass!

Taking one of the vestas, he struck a light, and holding it above hishead, carefully examined the room, from side to side. Then he tiptoedto a door, which stood ajar. This, he saw by a second match, was asleeping-room; and the two rooms, obviously, made up the suite. Adoor, securely locked, opened from the sleeping-room into the outerhallway. The door which opened from the larger room was likewiselocked, but to make assurance doubly sure Durkin slid a second insidebolt, for already his quick eye had caught the gleam of its polishedbrass, just below the door-knob of the ordinary mortised lock. Then, groping his way to the little switchboard, he touched a button, and theroom was flooded with light. He first looked about, carefully butquickly, and then glanced at his watch. He had at least two hours inwhich to do his work. Any time after that Pobloff might return. Andby midnight at least the Prince's valet would be back from Nice, tobegin packing his master's boxes. 

He slipped into the bedroom, and took from the bed a blanket andcomforter. These he draped above the hall door, to muffle any chancesound. Then he turned to the northeast corner of the room, where stoodwhat seemed to be a dressing cabinet, with little shelves and aplate-glass mirror above it. The lower part of it was covered by apolished rosewood door. 

One sharp twist and pry with his cold-chisel forced this flimsy outerdoor away from its lock. Beneath it, thus lightly masked, stood themore formidable safe door itself. Durkin drew in a sharp breath ofrelief as he looked at it with critical eyes. It was not quite thesort of thing he had expected. If it had been a combination lock hehad intended to tear away the woodwork covering it, pad the floor withthe bed mattress, and then pry it over on its face, to chisel away thecement that he knew would lie under its vulnerable sheet-iron bottom. But it was an ordinary, old-fashioned lock and key "Mennlicher, " Durkinat the first glance had seen--the sort of strong box which a Thirdavenue cigar seller, at home, would scarcely care to keep on hispremises. Yet this was the deposit vault for which hotel guests, suchas Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff, paid ten francs a day extra. 

The sound of footsteps passing down the hallway caused the intruder todraw back and listen. He turned quickly, waited, and came to a quick, new decision. Before doing so, however, he re-examined the room morecritically. 

This Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff was, obviously, a man of taste. He was also a man of means--and Durkin wondered if in that fact alonelay the reason why a certain young Belgian adventuress had followed himfrom Tangier to Algeciras, and from Algeciras to Gibraltar, and fromGibraltar still on to the Riviera. She had, at any rate, not followeda scentless quarry. He was not the mere curled and perfumed impostorso common to that little principality of shams. Even the garrulousyoung Chicagoan, from whom Durkin had secured his first Casino tickets, was able to vouch for the fact that Pobloff was a true _boyard_. Hewas also something or other in the imperial diplomatic service--justwhat it was Durkin could not at the moment remember. 

But he nursed his own personal convictions as to the moral stability ofthis true _boyard_. He had quietly witnessed, at Algeciras, thePrince's adroit card "riffling" in the sun-parlors of The ReinaCristina, when the gouty ex-ambassador to Persia had parted companywith many cumbersome dollars. Durkin's only course, in that time ofadversity and humility, had been one of silence. But he had inwardlyand adventurously resolved, if ever Fate should bring him and thePrince together under circumstances more untrammelled, he would not letpass a chance to balance up that ledger of princely venality. For hereindeed was an adversary, Durkin very well knew, who was worthy of anyman's steel. 

So the intruder, opening and closing drawers as he went, glancedquickly but appreciatively at the highly emblazoned cards lying on thelittle red-leather-covered writing-table, at the litter of papersbearing the red and blue and gold of the triple-crowned double eagle, at the solid gold seal, at the row of splendid and regal-looking womenin silver photograph holders, above the reading-desk, and a decanter ortwo of cut-glass. In one of the drawers of this desk he found anivory-handled revolver, a toy-like thirty-two caliber hammerless, ofEnglish make. Durkin glanced at it curiously, noticed that eachchamber held its cartridge, turned it over in his hand, replaced it inthe drawer, and after a moment's thought, took it out once more andslipped it into his hip pocket. Then his rapidly roving eye took inthe sable top-coat flung carelessly across the foot of the bed, theneat little heelless Tunisian slippers beneath it, the glistening, military-looking boots, each carefully nursing its English shoe-tree, ahighly embroidered smoking-cap, an ivory-handled shaving-set in itsstamped morocco case, one razor for each day of the week, and thesilver-mounted toilet bottles, so heavily chased. 

Having, apparently, made careful mental note of the rooms, Durkin oncemore turned back to the switchboard, and prying loose the flutedmolding that concealed the lighting-wires, he scraped away theinsulating tissue and severed the thread of copper with a sweep or twoof his narrow file. He felt safer, in that enforced darkness, for thework which lay before him. 

The black gloom was punctuated by the occasional flare of a match, andthe silence broken now and then, as he worked before the safe, by themetallic click and scrape of steel against steel, and by the muffledrasp and whine of his file against the wax-covered key which from timeto time he fitted into the unyielding safe lock. As he filed andtested and refiled, with infinite care and patience, his preoccupiedmind ranged vaguely along the channel of thought which the events ofthe last half-hour had opened up before him. He wondered why it wasthat Fortune should so favor those who stood the least in need of hersmile. For four nights during the last seven, he knew, the Prince hadwon, and won heavily, both in the Casino and in the Club Privé. Yet, on the other hand, there was the little Bulgarian princess with roomsjust across the corridor from his own, and the rightful possessor ofthe plain little diamond with which he had just cut his way into thismore sumptuous chamber. For a week past now, down at the Casino, shehad been losing steadily, as of course the vast and undirected majorityalways must lose. Even her solitaire earrings had been taken to Niceand pawned, Durkin knew. Three days before that, too, her maid--andwho is ever anybody on the Riviera without a maid?--had beenreluctantly and woefully discharged. At the Trente et Quarante table, as well, Durkin had watched the last thousand-franc note of thePrincess wither away. "And this, my dear, will mean another threemonths with my sweet old palsied Duc de la Houspignolle, " she hadlaughingly yet bitterly exclaimed, in excellent English, to theimpassive young Oxford man who was then dogging her heels. She was awit, and she had a beautiful hand, even though she was no better thanthe rest of Monte Carlo, ruminated the safe-breaker easily, as hesquinted, under the flare of a match, at the ward indentations in hiswax-covered key-flange. 

His thoughts went back, as he worked, to the timely yet unexpectedscene at the stair-head, two hours before. There he had helped a slimyoung _femme de chambre_ support the Princess to her room, that royallady having done her best to drown her ill fortune in absinthe andAmerican high-balls--which, he knew, was ever an impossiblecombination. She had collapsed at the head of the stairs, and as hehad helped lift her he had first caught sight of the solitaire diamondon the limp and slender finger. This reactionary mood, in the face ofthe earlier more tragical hours of that day of wearing anxieties, wasalmost one of facetiousness. He seemed to revel in the memory of what, in time, he knew, would be humiliating to him. It was a puny littlediamond ring, of but three or four carats' weight, he mused, and yetwith it had come the actual, if not the moral, turn in the tide of allhis restless activities. It marked the moment when life seemed to fallback to its older and darker areas; it was the first diminutivemilestone on his new road of adventure. But he would return the ring, of that he stoutly reassured himself, for he still nursed his ironicsense of justice in the smaller things. Yes, he would return the ring, he repeated, with his ever-recurring inapposite scrupulosity, for theyoung Princess was a lady of fortune under an unlucky star, likehimself. 

Durkin smiled a little, over his wax-covered key, as he still filed andfitted and listened. Then he gave vent to an almost inaudible "Ah!"for the bit of the key made the complete circuit, at last, and thewards of the lock clicked back into place. 

He swung open the heavy iron door, cautiously, listened for a moment, and then struck another match. 

That Pobloff might have the bank-notes with him was a contingency; thathe would carry about with him two thousand napoleons was an absurdity. And Durkin knew the money had not been deposited--to ascertain that hadbeen part of his day's work. The Prince, of course, was a prodigal andfree-handed gentleman--how much of his winnings had already leakedthrough his careless fingers it was impossible to surmise. Durkin evenresented the thought of that extravagance--as though it were a personaland obvious injustice to himself. If it was all the fruit of blindchance, if it came thus unearned and accidental, why should he not havehis share of it? Already Monte Carlo had taught him the mad necessityfor money. But now, of all times, it was necessary for him. One-half, one-quarter, of the sum which this careless-eyed Slavic aristocrat hadcarried so jauntily away from the Trente et Quarante table would endowhim with the means to come into his own once more. It was essentialthat he secure his sinews of war, even before he could continue hissearch for Frank, or rescue her from the dangers that beset her, if shestill wished for rescue. If he regretted the underground and underhandsteps through which that money could alone come into his possession, heconsoled his still protesting conscience with the claim that it was, after all, only a battle of wit against disinterested wit. For, self-delusively, he was beginning once more to regard all organizedsociety and its ways as a mere inquisitorial process which theadventurous could ignore and the keen-witted could circumvent. Warfare, such as his, must be a law unto itself!

Then he gave all his attention to the work before him, as he liftedfrom the safe, first a small steel despatch box, neatly initialed ingold, "I. S. P. , " and then a packet of blue-tinted envelopes, heldtogether by two rubber bands, and written on, here and there, in alanguage which the intruder assumed to be Russian. Next came ajapanned-tin box, which proved to hold nothing but a file of quiteunintelligible, Seidlitz-powder-colored papers, and then what seemed, to Durkin's exploring fingers, to be a few small morocco cases. Thequestion flashed through his mind: What if, after all, the money he waslooking for was not to be found! He struck still another match, withimpatient hands. His first fever of audacity had burned itself out, and some indefinite cold reaction of disdain and disgust was settingin. Stooping low, he peered into the safe once more. 

Then he gave a little sigh of relief. For there, behind a row of booksthat looked like small ledgers or journals, he caught sight of a stoutleather bag, tied with a corded silk rope. He dropped the burned-outend of the match, and, thrusting in an arm, lifted out the bag. As heplaced it on the floor the muffled click of metal smote on his ear. Hewiped the sweat from his forehead, with a sense of relief. He hadrisked too much to go away empty-handed. 

He tore at the carefully knotted cord, first with his fingers and thenwith his teeth. It was not so heavy as he had hoped it might be. Onmore collected second thoughts, indeed, it was woefully light. But theknot defied his efforts. He took out a second match, and was on thepoint of striking it. 

Instead of doing so, he stood suddenly erect, and then backednoiselessly into the remotest corner of the room. For a key had beenthrust into the lock of the anteroom door, and already the handle wasbeing slowly turned back. 

Durkin's breath quickened and shortened, and his hand swung back to hiship pocket. Then he waited, with his revolver in his hand. 

He counted and weighed his chances, quickly, one by one, as he stoodthere, in the black silence. He caught the diffused glimmer of thereflected light from the outer room as the door opened and closed, sharply. But the momentary half-light did not give him a glimpse ofwho or what was before him, for in a second all was blackness again. His first uneasy thought was that it was a very artful move. He andthat Other were alone there, in the utter darkness. Neither, now, would have the advantage. He had been a fool to leave one of the doorswithout its double lock, of some sort. He had once been told that itwas always through the more trivial contingency that the criminal wasultimately trapped. 

He strained his ears, and listened. He could hear nothing. Yet he waspositive that he could feel some approaching presence. It may havebeen a minute vibration of flooring; it may have been through theoperation of some occult sixth sense. But he was sure of thatmysterious Other, coming closer and closer to him. 

Suddenly something seemed to stir and move in the darkness. Hecrouched, with every nerve and muscle ready, and a moment later hewould have relieved the tension with some sort of cry, had he notrealized that it was the wooden Swiss clock above the cabinet, beginning to strike the hour. 

The sound came to an end, and Durkin was assuring himself that it couldnow be neither Pobloff nor the valet, when a second sound sent a tingleof apprehension through his frame. 

It was the blue spurt of a match that suddenly cut the blackness beforehim. The fool--he was striking a light!

Durkin crouched lower, and watched the flame as it grew on thedarkness. The direct glare of it made him blink a little, but he swunghis revolver barrel just above it, and a little to the right. He wasmore confident now, and quite collected. However it all turned out, itcould not be much worse than starving to death, unknown and alone insome public square of Monaco. 

As the tiny luminous circle flowered into wider flame the match washeld higher. Durkin could see the rose-like glow between the phalangesof the fingers shielding the light. Then, of a sudden, a face grew outof the blackness, a white face shadowed by a plumed hat. It was awoman's face. Durkin lowered his revolver, slowly, inch by inch. 

It was his wife who stood there in the darkness, not six paces awayfrom him. 

"_You_!" he gasped involuntarily, incredibly. Sheer wonder survivedhis instinctive recoil. It was the bolt, striking twice in the samespot. 

The two white faces looked at each other, gaped at each other, insanely. He could see her breath come and go, shortly, and thedeathly pallor of her face, and the relaxed lower jaw that had fallen alittle away from the drooping upper lip. But she neither moved norspoke. The match burned to her finger-ends, and fell to the floor. Darkness enveloped them again. 

"You!" he repeatedly vacuously. The blackness and the silence seemedto blanket and smother him, like something tangible to the touch. Hetook three steps toward where she still stood motionless, and in anagonized whisper cried out to her:

"_My God, Frank, what is it_?"

CHAPTER VI

THE WOMAN SPEAKS

"Ssssh!" said the woman under her breath, as she clutched Durkin's arm. 

He shook her hand off, impatiently, although the act seemed atcross-purposes with his own will. 

"But you--here!" he still gasped. 

"Oh, Jim!" she half-moaned, inadequately. Yet an _aura_ of calmnessseemed to surround her. So great was his own excitement that the wordsburst from him of their own will, apparently, and sounded like theutterance of a voice not his own. 

"What's it mean! How'd you get here?"

He could hear her shuddering, indrawn sigh. 

"What, in the name of heaven, do _you_ want in here? Why don't youspeak?"

There was a moment of unbroken silence. For the first time it seemedto come home to him that this woman who confronted him was his ownwife, in the flesh and blood. 

"What are _you_ doing here?" she demanded at last. 

He responded, even in his mood of hot antagonism, to some note ofever-sustained appeal about her. Even through the black gloom thatblanketed and blinded him some phantasmal and sub-conscious medium, like the imaginary circuit of a multiplex telegraph system, seemed tocarry to his mind some secondary message, some thought that she herselfhad not uttered. She, too, was suffering, but she had not shown it, for such was her way, he remembered. A wave of sympathy obliteratedhis resentment. He caught her in his arms, hungrily, and kissed herabandonedly. He noticed that her skin was cold and moist. 

"Oh, Jim, " she murmured again, weakly. 

"It's so long, isn't it?"

Then she added, with a little catch of the breath, as though even thatmomentary embrace were a joy too costly to be countenanced, "Turn onthe lights, quick!"

"I can't, " he told her. "I've cut the wires. "

He felt at her blindly, through the muffling blackness. She wasshaking a little now, on his arm. It bewildered him to think how hishunger for her could still obliterate all consciousness of time andplace. 

"Why didn't you write?" she pleaded pitifully. 

"I did write--a dozen times. Then I telegraphed!"

"Not a word came!" she cried. 

"Then I wrote twice to London!"

"And _those_ never came. Oh, everything was against me!" she moaned. 

"But how did you get here?" he still demanded. 

She did not answer his question. Instead, she asked him: "Where didyou send the Paris letters?"

"To 11 bis avenue Beaucourt. "

She groaned a little, impatiently. 

"That was foolish--I wrote you that I was leaving there--that I _had_to go!"

"Not a line reached me!"

He heard her little gasp of despair before she spoke. 

"I was put out of there, " she went on, hurriedly and evenly, yet with a_vibrata_ of passion in her crowded utterance. "There wasn't a pennyleft--the pupils I had gave up their lessons. What they had heard orfound out I don't know. Then I got a tiny room in the rue de Sèvres. I sold my last thing, then our wedding ring, even, to get it. "

"And then what?"

"I still waited--I thought you would know, or find out, and that insome way or other I should still hear from you. I would have gone tothe police, or advertised, but I knew it wouldn't be safe. "

Once more the embittering consciousness of some dark coalition offorces against them swept over him. Fate, at every step, hadfrustrated them. 

"I advertised twice, in the Herald?"

"Where would I see the Herald?"

"But you must have known I was trying to find you--that I was doingeverything possible!"

"I knew nothing, " she answered, in her poignantly emotionless voice. And the thought swept through Durkin that something within her hadwithered and died during those last grim weeks of suffering. 

"But here--how did you get here--and what's this Lady Boxspurbusiness?" he still insisted. 

"Yes, yes, " she almost moaned, "if you'll only wait I'll tell you. Butis it safe to stay here? Have you thought where we are?"

"Yes; it's safe, quite safe, for an hour yet. "

"Why didn't you send me money, or help me?" she asked, in her dead andunhappy monotone. 

"I did, eighty francs, all I had. I hadn't a penny left. I didn'tknow the damned language. I prowled about like a cat in a strangegarret, but I tried everything, from the American consul at Nice to a_Herald_ correspondent at San Remo. Then I got word of a consumptiveyoung writer from New York, at Mentone--but he died the day I was tomeet him. Then I heard of the new Marconi station up the coast, andworked at wireless for two weeks, and made twenty dollars, before theysacked me for not being able to send a message out to a Messinafruit-steamer, in Italian. Then I chanced on the job of doctoring up agenerator on an American yacht down here in the bay. "

"Yes, yes--I know how hard it is!"

"But listen! When I was on board at work I overheard a Supreme Courtjudge and a special agent from the Central Office in New York and twoEnglish detectives talking over the loss of certain securities. Andthose securities belong to Richard Penfield!"

He knew that she had started, at the sound of that name. 

"Penfield!" she gasped. "What of him?"

"When the district-attorney's men raided Penfield's New York gamblingclub, one of Penfield's new men got away with all his papers. They hadbeen withdrawn from the Fifth Avenue Safe Deposit Company, for theywere mostly cheques and negotiable securities, worth about two hundredand fifty thousand dollars. But beyond all their face value, theyconstituted _prima facie_ evidence against the gambler. "

"But what's all this to us, now?"

"They were smuggled to New Jersey. There the Jersey City chief ofpolice took action, and this agent of Penfield's carried the documentsacross the North River and up to Stamford. From there he got back toNew York again, by night, where he met a second agent, who had securedpassage on the _Slavonia_ for Naples. The first man is MacNutt. "

"MacNutt!" ejaculated the listening woman. 

"Yes, MacNutt! He compromised with Penfield and swung in with him whenthe district-attorney started pounding at them both. The second man isa lawyer named Keenan, who was disbarred for conspiracy in the Braytondivorce case. Keenan and his papers are due at Genoa on Friday. Ifound some of this out on board the yacht. I thought it over--and itwas the only way open for me. I couldn't stand out against it all, anylonger. I thought I could make the plunge, without your ever knowingit--and perhaps get enough to keep you out of any more messes likethis!"

"You had given me up?" she cried, reprovingly. 

"No--no--no--I'd only given up waiting for chances to _find you_. MyGod, don't you suppose I knew you needed me!"

"It would have been too late!" she said, in her dead voice. "It's toolate, already!"

"Then you don't care?" he demanded, almost brokenly. 

"I'll never complain, or whine, again!" she answered with drearylistlessness. 

"Then why _are_ you in this room?"

"_I mean that I've given up myself_. I'm in it, now, as deep as you!I couldn't fight it back any longer--it _had_ to come!"

"But why, and how! Why don't you explain?"

He could feel her groping away from him in the darkness. 

"Wait, " she whispered. 

"But why should I wait?" he demanded. 

"Listen! That second room door is still unlocked, and there's dangerenough here, without inviting it. "

He groped after her into the bedroom. He could hear the gentle scrapeof the key and the muffled sound of the lock as she turned it, followedby the cautious slide of the brass bolt, lower on the door. He waitedfor her, standing at the foot of the bed. He could hear her sigh ofweariness as she sat down on the edge of the disordered mattress. Then, remembering that he had cut the wires of only the larger room, hefelt his way to the button at the head of the bed. He snapped thecurrent open and instantly the blinding white light flooded the chamber. 

"_Is_ it safe here, any longer?" she asked restlessly, pausing a momentto accustom her eyes to the light, and then gazing up at him with animpersonal studiousness of stare that seemed to wall and bar her offfrom him. Still again he was oppressed by some sense of alienation, oflooming tragedy between them. She, too, must have known some shadow ofthat feeling, for he saw the look of troubled concern, of unspokenpity, that crept over her face; and he turned away brusquely. 

She spoke his name, quietly; and his gaze coasted round to her again. She watched him with wide and hungry eyes. 

Her breast heaved, at his silence, but all she said was: "Is it safe, Jim?"

"Yes, it's perfectly safe. So tell me what you have to say. Itdoesn't mean any greater risk. We would only have to come backagain--for I've work to do in this room yet!"

The return of the light seemed to give a new cast of practicality tohis thoughts. 

"What sort of work?" his wife was asking him. 

"Seventeen hundred napoleons in gold to find, " he answered grimly. 

"Oh, it's not that, not _that_!" she said, starting up. "It's thepapers, the Gibraltar papers!"

"Papers?" he repeated wonderingly. 

"Yes, the imperial specifications. Pobloff's a paid agent in theFrench secret service. They say he was the man who secured Kitchener'sAfghanistan frontier plans, and in some way or other had a good deal todo with the Curzon resignation. "

"Ah, I _thought_ there was something behind our _boyard_!"

"A year ago last March he was arrested in Jamaica, by the Britishauthorities, for securing secret photographs of the Port Royalfortifications. They court-martialed one of the non-commissionedofficers for helping him get an admission to the fortress, but theofficer shot himself, and Pobloff had the plates spirited away, so thecase fell through. Now he's got duplicates of every Upper Gallery andevery new fortification of the Rock at Gibraltar. "

"But why waste time over these things?"

"Pobloff got them through an English officer's wife. She was weak--andworse--she lost her head over him. I can't tell you more now. Butthere is an order for five hundred pounds waiting for me at the BritishEmbassy, in Rome, from the Foreign Office, if I secure those papers!"

"That's twenty-five hundred dollars?"

"Yes, almost. "

"And I was on the point of crawling away with a few napoleons!" saidDurkin in a whisper. He began to succumb to the intoxication of thisrapidity of movement which life was once more taking on. He wasspeed-mad, like a motorist on a white and lonely road. Yet anever-recurring dismay and distrust of the end kept coming to him. 

"But how did you come to find all this out? What happened after therue de Sèvres?"

"Oh, it was all easy and natural enough, if I could only put it intowords. After a few days, when I was hungry and sick, I went to one ofthe English hotels. I would have taken anything, even a servant'swork, I believe. "

He cursed himself to think that it was through him that she had come tosuch things. 

"But I was lucky, " she went on, hurriedly. "One afternoon I stumbledon a weeping lady's maid, on the verge of hysterics, who found enoughconfidence in me, in time, to tell me that her mistress had gone mad inher room and was clawing down the wallpaper and talking about killingherself. It was true enough, in a way, I soon found out, for it was anEnglish noblewoman who had fought with her husband two weeks before inLondon, and had run away to Paris. What she had dipped into, and gonethrough, and suffered, I could only guess; but I know this: that thatafternoon she had drunk half a pint of raw alcohol when the frightenedmaid had locked her in the bath-room. So I pushed in and took charge. First I wired to the woman's husband, Lord Boxspur, who sent me money, at once, and an order to bring her home as quietly as possible. He metus at Calais. It was a terrible ordeal for me, all through, for shetried to jump overboard, in the Channel, and was so insane, sohopelessly insane, that a week after we reached London she wascommitted to some sort of private asylum. "

"And then?" asked Durkin. 

"Then Boxspur thought that possibly I knew too much for his personalcomfort. I rather think he looked on me as dangerous. He put me offand put me off, until I was glad to snatch at a position in anext-of-kin agency. But in a fortnight or two I was even more glad toleave it. Then I went back to Lord Boxspur, who this time sent mehelter-skelter back to Paris, to bribe a blackmailing newspaper womanfrom giving the details of his wife's misfortunes to the Continentalcorrespondent of a London weekly. But even when that was done, and Ihad been duly paid for my work, I was only secure for a few weeks, atthe outside. All along I kept writing for you, frantically. So, whenthings began to get hopeless again, I went to the British Embassy. Ihad to lie, terribly, I'm afraid, before I could get an audience, firstwith an under secretary, and then with the ambassador himself. He saidthat he regretted he could do nothing for me, at least, officially. Helooked at my clothes, and laughed a little, and said that of course, incases of absolute destitution he sometimes felt compelled to come tothe help of his fellow-countrymen. I told him that I knew the world, and was willing to undertake work of any sort. He answered that suchcases were usually looked after at the consulate, and advised me to gothere. But I didn't give him up, at once. I told him I wasresourceful, and experienced, and might undertake even minor officialtasks for him, until I had heard from my husband. Then he hesitated alittle, and asked me if I knew the Continent well, and if I was averseto traveling alone. Then he called somebody up on his telephone, andin a few minutes came out and shook his head doubtfully, and advised meto apply at the consulate. Instead of that, I went not to the English, but to the American consul first. He told me that in five weeks asea-captain friend of his was sailing from Havre to New York, and thatit might not be impossible to have me carried along. "

"That's what they always say!"

"It was the best he could do. Then I went to the British consul. Hespoke about references, which left me blank; and tried to pump me, which left me frightened. But he could do nothing, he told me, exceptin the way of a personal donation, and that, he assumed, was out of thequestion. So I went back to the Embassy once more. I don't know why, but this time, for some reason or other, the ambassador believed in me. He gave me a week's trial as a sort of second deputy private secretary, indexing three-year-old correspondence and copying Roumanianagricultural reports. Then he put me on ordinance-report work. Thensomething happened--I can't go into details now--to arouse mysuspicions. I rummaged through the storage closet in my temporaryoffice and looped his telephone wire with twenty feet of number twelvewire from a broken electric fan, and an unused transmitter. Then, scrap by scrap, I picked up my first inklings of what was at thatmoment worrying the Foreign Office and the people at the Embassy aswell. It was the capture of the Gibraltar specifications by PrinceSlevenski Pobloff. When a Foreign Office secret agent telephoned inthat Pobloff had been seen in Nice, I fought against the temptation forhalf a day, then I went straight to the ambassador and told him what Iknew, but not how I came to know it. He gave me two hundred francs anda ticket to Monte Carlo, with a letter to deliver in Rome, if by anychance I should succeed. "

"That would give us the show we want! _That_ would give us a chance!"

She did not understand him. "A chance for what?"

CHAPTER VII

OUR FRIEND THE ENEMY

Durkin was pacing up and down the small room in his stockinged feet, looking at her, from time to time, with a detached, but ever studiouslyalert glance. Then he came to a stop, and confronted her. The memoryof the night before, in the Promenade, with the sudden glimpse of herprofile against the floating automobile curtain, came back to his mind, with a stab of pain. 

"But what has all this to do with Lady Boxspur?" he suddenly demanded, wondering how long he should be able to have faith in that inner, unshaken integrity of hers which had passed through so many trials andsurvived so many calamities. But she hurried on, as though unconsciousof both his tone and his attitude. 

"That has more to do with the next-of-kin agency. I left it out, ofcourse, but if you _must_ know it now, and here, I can tell you in aword or two. "

"One naturally wants to know when one's wife ascends into thearistocracy!"

"And a Mercedes touring car as well! But, oh, Jim, surely you and Idon't need to go back to all that sort of thing, at this stage of thegame, " she retorted wearily. She felt wounded, weighed down with aperverse sense of injury at his treatment, of injustice at hiscoldness, even in the face of the incongruous circumstances under whichthey had met. 

But she went on speaking, resolutely, as though to purge her soul, forall time, of explanation and excuse. 

"That next-of-kin agency was a dingy little office up two dingy stairsin Chancery Lane. For a few days their work seemed bearable enough, though it hurt me to see that all their income was being squeezed outof miserably poor people--always the miserably poor, the submergedsouls with romantic dreams of impending good fortune, which, of course, always just escaped them. That, I could endure. But when I found thatthe agency was branching out, and was actually trying to present me forinspection as a titled heiress, in sore need of a secret and immediatemarriage, I revolted, at once. Then they calmly proposed that I embarkfor America, as some sort of bogus countess--and while they were stilltalking and debating over what mild and strictly limited extravagancesthey would stand for, and just what expenses they would allow, Ibolted! But their scheming and plotting had given me the hint, for Iknew, if the worst came to the worst, I would not be altogether underthe thumb of Lord Boxspur. So when I came South from Paris I simplyassumed the title--it simplified so many things. It both gave meopportunities and protected me. If, to gain my ends and to reconnoitremy territory, I became the occasional guest--remember, Jim, the mostdiscreet and guarded guest!--of Count Anton Szapary--who carried ahundred thousand crowns away from the Vienna Jockey Club a month or twoago--you must simply try to make the end justify the means. I wasstill trying to get in touch with you. One of his automobiles wasalways politely placed at my disposal. It was a chance, well, scarcelyto be missed. For, you see, it was my intention to meet His Highness, the Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff, under slightly differentcircumstances than would prevail if he and his valet should quietlystep through that door at the present moment!"

She laughed, a little bitterly, with a reckless shrug of the shoulders. Durkin, nettled by the sound of tragedy in her voice, did not like thesound of that laugh. Then, as he looked at her more critically, he sawthat she was white and worn and tired. But it was the words over whichshe had laughed which sent him abruptly hurrying into the next roomwith a lighted match, to read the hour from the little Swiss clockabove the cabinet. 

"If we're after anything here we've got to get it!" he said, withconscious roughness. "It's later than I thought. "

"Very well, " she answered, quietly enough. 

Then she turned to him, as he waited with his hand on the bedroomlight-button, before switching it off. 

"You need never be afraid that I will bother you with any more of myhesitations, and scruples, and half-timid qualms, as I once did. Allthat is over and done with. I feel, now, that we're both in this sortof work from necessity, and not by accident. It has gripped andengulfed us, now, for good. "

He raised a hand to stop her, stung to the quick by the misery andbitterness of her voice, still asking himself if it was not only thebitter cry of love for some neglectful love's reply. But she swept on, abandonedly. 

"There's no use quibbling and fighting against it. We've got to keepat it, and wring out of it what we can, and always go back to it, andbend to it, and still keep at it, to the bitter end!"

"Frank, you mustn't say this!" he cried. 

"But it's truth, pure truth. We're only going to live once. If wecan't be happy without doing the things we ought not to do--then we'llsimply _have to be criminals_. But I want my share of the joy ofliving--I want my happiness! I want _you_! I lost you once, andalmost forever, by hoping it could be the other way--but it's too late!"

"Frank!" he pleaded. 

"I want you to see where we are, " she said, with slow and terriblesolemnity. "If I am to be saved from it, now, or ever again, _you_must do it--_you--you_!"

She drew herself together, with a little shiver. 

"Come, " she said, "we've got our work to do!"

He looked at her white face for one moment, in silence, bewildered, andthen he snapped shut the button. 

"We had better look through the safe at once, " she went onapathetically. Something in her tone, if not her words themselves, asshe had spoken, sent a wave of what was more than startled miserythrough her husband. He once more felt, although he felt it vaguely, the note of impending tragedy which she was so premonitarily sounding. It brought to him a dim and hurried vision of that far-off butinevitable catastrophe which lay, somewhere, at the end of the roadthey were traveling. Their only hope and solace, it seemed to him, must thereafter lie in feverish and sustained activity. They must losethemselves in the dash and whirl of daring moments. And it was notfrom pleasure or from choice, now; it was to live. They must act orperish; they must plot and counterplot, or be submerged. Yet he woulddo what he could to save himself, as she, in turn, must do what shecould for herself--if they came to the end of their rope. 

A minute later they were bending together over the contents of thedismantled safe. He was striking matches. By this time they were bothon their knees. 

"You run through these papers, while I see what can be done with thedespatch box, " he whispered to her. Then he put the little package ofvestas between them, so they might work by their own light. From timeto time the soft spurt of the lighting match broke the silence, asFrank hurriedly ran her eye over the different packets, and ashurriedly flung them back into the safe. 

It was a relief to Durkin to think that he at least had someone besidehim who could read French. Busy as he was, he incongruously recalledto his mind how he once used to study the little printed announcementsin his hotel rooms, wondering, ruefully, if the delphic text meant thatlights and fires were extra, and if baths must be paid for, and vainlytrying to discover what his last basket of wood might cost. 

Yes, he told himself, he was a hunter out of his domain. He wouldalways feel intimidated and insecure in this land of aliens andunknowns. He even sympathetically wondered who it was that had said:"Foreigners are fools!" Then a sudden, irrational, inconsequentialsense of gratitude took possession of him, as he felt and heard thewoman at work so close beside him. There was a feeling ofcompanionship about it that made the double risk worth while. 

"There's nothing here!" Frank was saying, under her breath. 

"Then it _must_ be the box!" he told her. 

Durkin knew it was already too late to file and fit a skeleton key. His first impulse was to bury the box under a muffling pile of beddingand send a bullet or two through the lock. But his wandering eyecaught sight of a Morocco sheath-knife above them on the wall, and amoment later he had the point of it under the steel-bound lid, and ashe pried it flew open with a snap. 

He waited, listening, and lighting matches, while Frank went throughthe papers, with nervous and agile fingers, mumbling the inscriptionsas she hurriedly read and cast them away from her. 

"I thought so!" she said at last, crisply. 

The packet held half a dozen blueprints, together with some twelve orfourteen sheets of plans and specifications, on tinted "flimsy. "Durkin noticed they were drawn up in red and black ink, and that at thebottom of each document were paragraphs of finely-penned, scholarly-looking writing. One glance was enough for them both. 

Frank refolded them and caught them together with a rubber band. Thenshe thrust them into the bosom of her dress. Both rose to their feet, for both were filled with the selfsame sudden passion to get into theopen once more. 

"That must go back, now!" whispered Frank, for Durkin was stooping downagain, over the leather bag that held the napoleons. 

"Thank heaven, " he answered gratefully, "it's not _that_!"

"Not _yet_!" she whispered back, bitterly, as she heard the chink andrattle of metal in the darkness. But some day it might be. 

Then she heard another sound, which caused her to catch quickly atDurkin's arm. It was the sound of a key turning in the lock, followedby an impatient little French oath, and the weight of a man's bodyagainst the resisting door. Then the oath was repeated, and a secondkey was turned, this time in the nearer door. 

"It's Pobloff!" she whispered. 

She had felt the almost galvanic, precautionary response of Durkin'sbody; now she could hear his whispered ejaculation as he clutched ather and thrust her back. 

"_You_ must get away, quick, whatever happens, " he said hurriedly. There was a second tremor and rattle of the door; it might come in atany moment. 

"Don't think of me, " she whispered. "It's _you_!"

"But, my God, how'll you get out of this?" he demanded, in a quickwhisper. He was trying to force her back into the little anteroom. 

"No, no; don't!" she answered him. "I can manage it--more easily thanyou!"

"But how?"

He was still crowding and elbowing her back, as though mere retreatmeant more assured safety. 

"No, _no_!" she expostulated, under her breath. "I can shift formyself. It's _you_--you must get away!"

She was forcing the packet from her bosom into his hands. 

"Take care of these, quick! Now here's the window ready. Oh, Jim, getaway while you've got the chance!"

"I can't do it!" he protested. 

"You _must_, I tell you. I wouldn't lie to you! On my honor, Ipromise you I'll come out of this room, unharmed and free! But quick, or we'll both lose!"

Even in that moment of peril the thought that she was still ready toface this much for him filled his shaken body with a glow that was morekeenly exhilarating than wine itself. There was no time for words ordemonstration: the action carried its own eloquence. 

He was already halfway through the opened window, but he turned back. 

"Do you care, then?" he panted. 

He could hear the quick catch of her breath. 

"Good or bad, I love you, Jim! You know that! Now, hurry, oh, hurry!"

He caught her hand in his--that was all there was time for--while withhis free hand Durkin thrust the packet down into his pocket. 

"If it turns out wrong--I mean if anything should happen to me, gostraight to the Embassy with them, in Rome. Good-bye!"

"Ah, then you _do_ expect danger!" he retorted, already back at thewindow again. 

"No--no!" she whispered, resolutely, barring his ingress. "Hurry!Good-bye!"

"Good-bye, " he whispered, as he slipped down on his hands and knees andcrawled along the balcony, like a cat, through the darkness. 

Then the woman closed the window, and waited. 

CHAPTER VIII

"FOREIGNERS ARE FOOLS"

Frances Durkin, as she turned back into the darkness of the room, desperately schooled herself to calmness. She warned herself that, above all, she must remain clear-headed and collected, and act coollyand decisively, when the moment for action arrived. 

But as the seconds slipped by, and the silence remained unbroken, ashred of forlorn hope came back to her. Each moment meant more assuredsafety to her husband--he, at least, was getting away unscathed andunsuspected. And that left her almost satisfied. 

She still waited and listened. Perhaps, after all, the Prince hadtaken his departure. Perhaps he had gone back to the _portier's_office, for explanations. Perhaps it had not even been Pobloff--merelya drunken stranger, mistaken in his room number, or servants with amessage or with linen. 

She groped softly across the room, until she came to the door. Shefound it draped and covered with a heavy blanket. Holding this back, she slipped under it, and peered through the keyhole into theilluminated hallway. There seemed to be nobody outside. 

"It is a rule of the game, I believe, never to shoot the rabbit untilit is on the run!"

The words, spoken in excellent English, and barbed with a touch ofangry cynicism, smote on her startled ears like an Alpine thunderclap. 

She emerged from under the blanket, slowly, ignominiously, ashamed ofeven her Peeping-Tom abandonment of dignity. 

As she did so she saw herself being looked at with keen but placideyes. The owner of the eyes in one hand held a lighted bedroom lamp. In his other hand he held a flat, short-barreled pocket revolver, ofburnished gun-metal, and she could see the lamplight glimmer along itsside as it menaced her. 

She did not gasp--nor did she shrink away, for with her the situationwas not so novel as her antagonist might have imagined. Indeed, as shegazed back at him, motionless, she saw the look of increasing wonderwhich crept, almost involuntarily, over his white, lean, Slavic-lookingface. 

Frances Durkin knew it was Pobloff. He was tall, exceptionally tall, and she noticed that he carried off his faultlessness of attire withthat stiff but tranquil _hauteur_ which seems to come only with amilitary training. The forehead was high and white and prominent, withoddly marked depressions, now thrown into shadow by the lamp light, above and behind the highly-arched eyebrows, on each extremity of thefrontal bone. The nose was long and narrow-bridged, and the faceitself was unusually long and narrow, and now quite colorless. Thisgave a darker hue to the thin mustache and the trim imperial, throughwhich she caught a glint of white teeth, in what seemed half a smileand half a snarl. The hair was parted almost in the centre, a littleto the right, and but for the pebbled shadows about the sunken, yetstill bright eyes, he would be called a youthful-looking man. Sheunderstood why women would always speak of him as a handsome man. 

"I am sorry, but I was compelled to force the bolt, " he said, slowly, with his enigmatic smile. 

She still looked at him in silence, from under lowered brows. Herfingers were locking and unlocking nervously. 

"And to what do I owe this visit?" he demanded mockingly. He was quiteclose to her by this time. 

She took a step backward. She could even smell brandy on his breath. 

"Your English is admirable!" she answered, as mockingly. 

"As your energy!" he retorted, taking a step nearer the still opendoor. Then he looked about the room, slowly and comprehensively. Onhis face, in the strong sidelight, she could see mirrored each freshdiscovery, as step by step he covered the course of the completedinvasion. She followed his gaze, which now rested on the rifled safe. 

A little oath, in Russian, suddenly escaped his lips. 

Then he turned and strode into the anteroom, and she could hear himmaking fast and locking the outer hall door. Then he withdrew the key, and came back to her. 

"I must still regard you, of course, as my guest, " he said slowly, withhis easy menace. 

"You Europeans always give us lessons in the older virtues!" sheretorted, as mockingly as before, in her soft contralto. 

He looked at her, for a moment, in puzzled wonder. Then he held thelamp closer to her face. He nursed no illusions about women. FrancesDurkin knew that for years now he had made them his tools and hisaccomplices, never his dictators and masters. But as he looked intothe pale face, with the shadowy, almost luminous violet eyes, and thesoft droop of the full red lips, and the still girlish tenderness ofline about the brow and chin, and then at the betraying fulness ofthroat and bosom, the mockery died out of his smile. 

It was supplanted by a look more ominously purposeful, more grimlydetermined. 

"What, madam, did you come here for?" he demanded. 

She shrugged an apparently careless shoulder. 

"His Highness, the Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff, has always been therecipient of much flattering attention!" She found it still safest tomock him. 

"We have had enough of this! What is it? Money? Or jewelry?"

She spurned the leather bag on the floor with the toe of her shoe. Hecould hear the clink and rattle of the napoleons that followed themovement. He started suddenly forward and bent over the brokendespatch box. His long white fingers were running dexterously throughthe once orderly little packets. 

"_Or something more important_?" he went on, as he came to the end ofhis stock. 

Then he gave a little half-cry, half-gasp; and from the look on hisface the woman saw that he realized what was missing. He peered ather, with alert and narrow eyes, for a full minute of unbroken silence. Then, with a little movement of finality, he turned away and put downthe lamp. 

"I regret it, but I must ask you for this--this document, withoutequivocation and without delay. "

She opened her lips to speak, but he cut in before any sound fell fromthem. 

"Let there be no misunderstanding between us. I know precisely whatyou have taken; and it will be in my hands _before you ever leave thisroom_!"

She had a sense of destiny shaping itself before her, while she stood ahelpless and disinterested spectator of the vague but implacabletransformation which, in the end, must in one way or the other sovitally concern her. 

"I have nothing, " she answered simply. 

He waved her protest aside. 

"Madam, have you thought, or do you now know, what the cost of thiswill be to you?"

He was towering over her now. She was wondering whether or not therewas a ghost of a chance for her to snatch at his pistol. 

"I can pay only what I owe, " she maintained evasively. 

He looked at her, and then at the locked door. His face took on asudden and crafty change. The rage and anger ebbed out of him. Heplaced the lamp on the dressing-table of polished rosewood. Then hislean, white fingers meditatively adjusted his tie, and even moremeditatively stroked at the narrow black imperial, before he spokeagain. 

"What greater crown may one hope for, in any activity of life, than abeautiful woman?" he asked quietly. 

There was a moment of unbroken silence. 

For the first time a touch of fear came to her shadowy eyes, and theywere veiled by a momentary look of furtiveness. 

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, madam, simply that you will now remain with me!"

"That is absurd!"

She noticed, for the first time, that he had put away his revolver. 

"It is not absurd; it is essential. Permit me. In my native countrywe have a secret order which I need not name. If the secrets of thisorder came to be known by an individual not already a member, one oftwo things happened. He either became a member of the order, or hebecame a man who--who could impart no information!"

"And that means----?"

"It means, practically, that from this hour you are, either willing orunwilling, a partner in my activities, as you now are in my possessionof certain papers. Pardon me. The penalty may seem heavy, but thecase, you will understand, is exceptional. Also, the nature of yourvisit, and the thoroughness of your preparations"--he swept thedismantled room with his grim but mocking glance--"have alreadyconvinced me that the partnership will not be an impossible one. "

"But I repeat, this is theatrical, and absurd. You cannot possiblykeep me a--a prisoner here, forever!"

He looked at her, and suddenly she shrank back from his glance, whiteto the lips. 

"You will not be a prisoner!"

"I am quite aware of that!"

"You will not be a prisoner, for then you would not be a partner. Thecoalition between us must be as silent as it is essential. But first, permit me!"

She still shrank back from his touch, consumed with a new andunlooked-for fear of him. And all the while she was telling herselfthat she must remain calm, and make no mistake. 

The remembrance came to her, as she stood there, of how she had oncethought it possible to approach him in a more indirect and adroitfashion, as the wayward and life-loving Lady Boxspur. She shuddered alittle, as she recalled that foolish mistake, and pictured the perilsinto which it might have led her. She could detect more clearly nowthe odor of brandy on his quickening breath. His face, death-like inits pallor, flashed before and above her like a semaphoric sign ofimminent danger. Action of some sort, however obvious, was necessary. 

"I want a drink, " she gasped, with a movement toward the cabinet. 

He turned and caught up the heavy glass brandy-decanter, emitting anervous and irresponsible laugh. 

In one hand he held the decanter, in the other the half-filled tumbler. That, at least, implied an appreciable space of time before those handscould be freed. In that, she felt, lay her hope. 

Quicker than thought she darted to the door over which still swung theshrouding blanket. She knew the key had already been turned in thelock, from the outside; the only thing between her and the freedom ofthe open hall was one small bolt shaft. 

But before she could open the door Pobloff, with a little grunt ofstartled rage, was upon her. She fought and scratched like a cat. Theblanket tumbled down and curtained them, the plumed hat fell from thewoman's disheveled head, a chair was overturned. But he was too strongand too quick for her. With one lithe arm he pinioned her two handsclose down to her sides, crushing the very breath out of her body. With his other he beat off the muffling blanket, and dragged her awayfrom the door. Then he shook her, passionately, and held her off fromhim, and glared at her. 

One year earlier in her career she knew she would surely have faintedfrom terror and exhaustion. Even as it was, she seemed about to schoolherself for some relieving and final surrender to the inevitable, only, her vacantly staring eyes, looking past him, by accident caught sightof a little movement which brought her drooping courage into life again. 

For she had seen the window-shutter slowly widen, and then a cautioushand appear on the ledge. She watched the shutter swing in, furtherand further, and then the stealthy figure, with its padded feet, emergeout of the darkness into the half-lighted room. She could even see thepallor of the intruder's face, and his quick movement of warning thatreminded her of the part she must play. 

"I give up!" she gasped, in simulated surrender, falling and droopingwith all her weight in Pobloff's arms. 

He caught her and held her, bewildered, triumphant. 

"You mean it?" he cried, searching her face. 

"Yes, I mean it!" she murmured. Then she shuddered a little, involuntarily, for she had seen Durkin catch up one of his shoes, hammer-like, where it protruded from the side pocket of his coat--andshe knew only too well how he would make use of it. 

As Pobloff bent over her, unwarned, unsuspecting, almost wondering forwhat she was waiting with such confidently closed eyes, Durkin crossedthe carpeted floor. It was then that the woman flung up her own armsand encircled the stooping Russian in a fierce and passionate grasp. He laughed a little, deep in his throat. She told herself that she wasat least imprisoning his hands. 

Durkin's blow caught the bending figure just at the base of the skull, behind the ear. The impact whipped the head back, and sent therelaxing body forward and down. It struck the floor, and lay there, huddled, face down. The woman scrambled to her feet, breathing hard. 

"Close the shutters!" said Durkin quickly. 

Then he turned the unconscious man over on his back. Then he caught upa couple of towels and securely tied, first the inert wrists and thenthe feet. Quickly knotting a third towel, he wedged and drilled asharp knuckle joint into the flesh of the colorless cheek, between theupper and lower incisors. When the jaw had opened he thrust the knotinto the gaping mouth, securely tying the ends of the towel at the backof the neck. 

"Have you everything?" whispered Frank, who had once more pinned on theplumed hat, and was already listening at the panel of the hall door. There was no time to be lost in talk. 

"Yes, I think so. "

"Your baggage?"

"My baggage will have to be left, but, God knows, there's little enoughof it!"

He wiped his forehead, and looked down at the bound figure, alreadyshowing signs of returning consciousness. They heard laughter, and thesound of footsteps passing down the hall without. 

Durkin stood beside his wife, and they listened together behind theclosed door. 

"Not for a minute--not yet, " he whispered. Then he looked at hercuriously. 

"I wonder if you know just what a close call that was!"

"Yes, I know, " she said, with her ear against the panel. 

He peered back at the figure, and took a deep breath. 

"And this is only an intermission--this is only an overture, to what wemay have to face! Now's our chance. For the love of heaven, let's getout of here. We've got hard work ahead of us, at Genoa--and we've gotonly till Friday to get there!"

He did not notice her look, her momentary look of mingled reproof andweariness and disdain. 

"Now, quick!" she merely said, as she flung the door open and steppedout into the hall. Luckily, it was empty, from end to end. 

Durkin, with assumed nonchalance, walked quietly away. She waited toturn the key in the door, and withdrew it from the lock. Then shefollowed her husband down the corridor, and a minute or two laterrejoined him in the fragrant and balmy midnight air of Monaco. 

CHAPTER IX

THE LARK IN THE RUINS

It was not until Frances Durkin and her husband were installed in anempty first-class compartment, twining and curling and speeding ontheir way to Genoa, that even a comparative sense of safety came tothem. It was Durkin's suggestion that it might not be amiss for themto give the impression of being a newly-married couple, on theirhoneymoon journey; and, to this end, he had half-filled the compartmentwith daffodils and jonquils, with carnations and violets and roses, purchased with one turn of the hand from a midnight flower-vender, onhis way down from the hills for any early morning traffic that mightoffer. 

So as they sped toward the Italian frontier, in the white and mellowMediterranean moonlight, threading their way between the tranquilviolet sea bejeweled with guardian lights and the steep and silentslopes of the huddled mountains, they lounged back on their hiredtrain-pillows, self-immured, and unperturbed, and quietly contentedwith themselves and their surroundings. At least, so it seemed to theeyes of each scrutinizing guard and official, who, after one sharpglance at the flower-filled compartment and the crooning young Englishlovers, passed on with a laugh and a shrug or two. 

Yet, at heart, Durkin and Frank were anything but happy. As they spedon, and his wife pointed out to him that the selfsame road they weretaking between confining rock and sea was the same narrow passage, sotime-worn and war-scarred, once taken by Greeks and Ligurians, Romansand Saracens, it seemed to Durkin that his first fine estimate of thelife of war and adventure had been a false one. His old besettingdoubts and scruples began to awake. It was true that the life they hadplunged into would have its dash and whirl. But it would be the dashof a moment, and the whirl of a second. Then, as it always must be, there would come the long interval of flight and concealment, thewearying stretch of inactivity. He felt, as he gazed out the carwindow and saw town and village and hamlet left behind them, that thesame wave of excitement that cast him up would forever in turn drag himdown--and it all resulted, he told himself, in his passing distemper offatigue and anxiety, in a little further abrasion, in a little sternerdenudation of their tortured souls!

It was at Ventimiglia that the _capostazione_ himself appeared at thedoor of their compartment, accompanied by a uniformed official. Thetwo fugitives, with their hearts in their mouths, leaned back on theircushions with assumed unconcern, cooing and chattering hand in handamong their flowers, while a volley of quick and angry questions, inItalian, was flung in at them from the opened compartment door. Tothis they paid not the slightest attention, for several moments. Frankturned to her interrogators, smiled at them gently and impersonally, and then shook her head impatiently, with an outthrust of the handswhich was meant to convey to them that each and every word they utteredwas quite incomprehensible to her. 

The _capostazione_, who, by this time, had pushed into theircompartment, was heatedly demanding either their passports or theirtickets. 

Frank, who had buried her face raptly in her armful of jonquils, lookedup at him with gentle exasperation. 

"We are English, " she said blankly. "English! We can't understand!"And she returned to her flowers and her husband once more. 

The two uniformed intruders conferred for a moment, while the_conduttore_, on the platform outside, naturally enough expostulatedover the delay of the train. 

"These fools--these aren't the two!" Frank heard the _capostazione_declare, in Italian, under his breath, as they swung down on thestation platform. Then the shrill little thin-noted engine-whistlesounded, the wheels began to turn, and they were once more speedingthrough the white moonlight, deeper and deeper into Italy. 

"I wonder, " said Frank, after a long silence, "how often we shall beable to do this sort of thing? I wonder how long luck--mere luck, willbe with us?"

"_Is_ it luck?" asked her husband. She was still leaning back on hisshoulder, with her hand clasping his. Accompanying her consciousnessof escape came a new lightness of spirit. There seemed to come overher, too, a new sense of gratitude for the nearness of this sentientand mysterious life, of this living and breathing man, that could bothcommand and satisfy some even more mysterious emotional hunger in herown heart. 

"Yes, " she answered, as she laughed a little, almost contentedly;"we're like the glass snake. We seem to break off at the point wherewe're caught, and escape, and go on again as before. I was onlywondering how many times a glass snake can leave its tail in itsenemy's teeth, and still grow another one!"

And although she laughed again Durkin knew how thinly that covering offacetiousness spread over her actual sobriety of character. It waslike a solitary drop of oil on quiet water--there was not much of it, but what there was must always be on the surface. 

In fact, her mood changed even as he looked down at her, troubled bythe shadow of utter weariness that rested on her colorless face. 

"What would we do, Jim, " she asked, after a second long and unbrokensilence, "what would we do if this thing ever brought us face to facewith MacNutt again?"

"But why should we cross that bridge before we come to it?" wasDurkin's answer. 

She seemed unable, however, to bar back from her mind some disturbingand unwelcome vision of that meeting. She felt, in a way, that shepossessed one faculty which the rapid and impetuous nature of herhusband could not claim. It was almost a weakness in him, she toldherself, the subsidiary indiscretion of a fecund and grimly resourcefulmind. Like a river in flood, it had its strange and incongruous backcurrents, born of its very oneness of too hurrying purpose. Itconsidered too deeply the imminent and not the remoter and seeminglymore trivial contingency. 

"But can't you see, Jim, that the further we follow this up the closerand closer it's bringing us to MacNutt?"

"MacNutt is ancient history to us now! We're over and done with him, for all time!"

"You are wrong there, Jim. You misjudge the situation, and youmisjudge the man. That is one fact we have to face, one hard fact;MacNutt is not over and done _with us_!"

"But haven't you made a sort of myth of him? Isn't he only a fable tous now? And haven't we got real facts to face?"

"Ah, " she said protestingly, "there is just the trouble. You alwaysrefuse to look _this_ fact in the face!"

"Well, what are the facts?" he asked conciliatingly, coercing hisattention, and demanding of himself what allowance he must make forthat morbid perversion of view which came of a too fatigued body andmind. 

"The facts are these, " she began, with a solemnity of tone thatstartled him into keener attentiveness. "You found me in MacNutt'soffice when he was planning and plotting and preparing for the biggestwire-tapping _coup_ in all his career. You were dragged into that plotagainst your will, almost, just as I had been. But MacNutt gave us ourparts, and we worked together there. Then--then you made love tome--don't deny it, Jim, for, after all, it was the happiest part of allmy life!--and we both saw how wrong we were, and we both wanted tofight for our freedom. So I followed you when you revolted againstMacNutt and his leadership. "

"No, Frank, it was _you_ who led--if it hadn't been for you there wouldnever have been any revolt!" he broke in. 

"We fought together, then, tooth and nail, and in the end wesurrendered everything but our own liberty--just to start over withfree hands. But it wasn't our mere escape to freedom that maddenedMacNutt; it was the thought that we had beaten him at his own game, that we had stalked him while he was so busy stalking Penfield. Thenhe trapped us, for a moment, and it was sheer good luck that he didn'tkill me that afternoon in his dismantled operating-room, before Dooganand his men attacked the house. But, as you know, he kept after us, and he cornered you again, and you would have killed _him_, in turn, ifI hadn't saved you from the sin of it, and the disgrace of it. Then wethought we were safe, just because the world was big and wide; becausewe had made our escape to Europe we thought that we were out of hiscircuit, that we were beyond his key-call--but here we are being ledand dragged back to him, through Keenan. But now, just because thereis still an ocean between us, you begin to believe that he has given upevery thought of getting even!"

"Well, isn't it about time he did? We've beaten him twice, at his owngame, and I see no reason why we shouldn't do it again!"

"But how often can we be the glass snake? I mean, how many times canwe afford to leave something behind, and break away, and hope to growwhole and sound again? And when will MacNutt get us where we can'tbreak away? I tell you, Jim, you don't know this man as I know him!You haven't understood yet what a cruelly designing and artful andvindictive and long-waiting enemy he can be. You haven't seen himbreak and crush people, as I once did. It's the memory of that makesme so afraid of him!"

"There's just the trouble, Frank, " cried Durkin. "The man hasterrified and intimidated you, until you think he is the only enemy youhave. I don't deny he isn't dangerous, but so is Pobloff, and so isDoogan, for that matter, and this man Keenan as well!"

"But they would never crush and smash you, as MacNutt will, if thechance comes!" she persisted passionately. "You don't see andunderstand it, because you are so close to it and so deep in it. It'slike traveling along this little Riviera railway. It's so crooked andtunneled and close under the mountains that even though we went up anddown it, for a year, from Nice to Nervi, we could never say that we hadseen the Riviera!"

Durkin looked out at the terraced hills, at the undulating fields andthe heaped masses of blue mountains under the white Italian moonlight, and did not speak for several seconds. 

He had always carried, while with her, the vague but sustained sense ofbeing shielded. Until then her hand had always seemed to guard him, impersonally, as the hand of a busy seeker guards and shelters acandle. Now, for some mysterious reason, he felt her broodingguardianship to be something less passive, to be something moreimmediate and personal. He knew--and he knew it with a fullappreciation of the irony that lurked in the situation--that her verytimorousness was now endowing him with a new and reckless courage. Sohe took her hand, gratefully, before he spoke again. 

"Well, whatever happens, we are now in this, not from choice, as yousaid before, but from necessity. If it has dangers, Frank, we mustface them. "

"It is nothing _but_ danger!"

"Then we must grin and bear it. But as I said, I see no reason why weshould cross our bridges before we come to them. And we'll soon have abridge to cross, and a hard one. "

"What bridge?"

"I mean Keenan, and everything that will happen in Genoa!"

CHAPTER X

THE TIGHTENING COIL

Henry Keenan, of New York, had leisurely finished his cigar, and had asleisurely glanced through all the three-day-old London papers. He hadeven puzzled, for another half-hour, over the pages of a _Tribuna_. Then, after gazing in an idle and listless manner about the empty anduninviting hotel reading-room, he decided that it was time for him togo up to his room. He made his leisurely way to the lift, ascended tothe fourth floor, stepped out, and drew his room-key from his pocket, as he walked down the hall, in the same idle and listless manner. 

As he turned the corner the listlessness went from his face, and achange came in his languid yet ever-restless and covert eyes. 

For a young woman was standing before his door, trying to fit a key tothe lock. This, he decided as he paused three paces from her andstudied her back, she was doing quite openly, with no slightest senseof secrecy. She wore a plumed hat, and a dark cloth tailor-made suitthat was unmistakably English. She still struggled with the key, unconscious of his presence. His tread on the thick carpet had beenlight; he had intended to catch her, beyond equivocation, in the act. But now something about the lines of her stooping figure caused HenryKeenan to remove his hat, respectfully, before speaking to her. 

"Could I assist you, madam?" he asked, close to her side by this time. 

She turned, with a start, though her loss of self-possession lasted buta moment. But as she turned her startled eyes to him Keenan's lastdoubt as to whether or not it was a mere mistake withered away from hismind. He knew, from the hot flush that mounted to her cheeks and fromthe mellow contralto of her carefully modulated English voice, that shebelonged to that vaguely denominated yet rigidly delimited type thatwould always be called a woman of breeding. 

"If you please, " she said shortly, stepping back from the door. 

He bent over the key which she had left still in the lock. 

As he did so he glanced at the number which the key, protruding fromthe lock, bore stamped on its flat brass bow. The number wasThirty-seven, while the number which stood before his eyes on the doorwas Forty-one. 

Under ordinary circumstances the apparent accident would never havegiven him a second thought. But all that day he had been oppressed bya sense of hidden yet continual espionage. This feeling had followedhim from the moment he had landed in Genoa. He had tried to argue itdown, inwardly protesting that such must be merely the obsession of allfugitives. And now, even to find an unknown and innocent-appearingyoung woman trying to force an entrance into his room aroused all hislatent cautiousness. Yet a moment later he felt ashamed of hissuspicions. 

"Why, this is room Forty-one, " she cried, over his shoulder. Hewithdrew the key and looked at it with a show of surprise. 

"And your key, I see, is Thirty-seven, " he explained. 

She was laughing now, a little, through her confusion. It was a verypleasant laugh, he thought. She looked a frank and companionablewoman, with her love for the merriment of life touched with a sort ofautumnal and wistful sobriety that in no way estranged it from a senseof youth. But, above all, she was a beautiful woman, thought thelistless and lonely man. He looked at her again. It was his suspicionof being spied upon, he felt, that had first blinded him to the charmof her appearance. 

"It was the second turn in the corridor that threw me out, " sheexplained. He found himself walking with her to her door. 

She had thought to find some touch of the Boweryite about him, someoutcropping of the half-submerged bunco-steerer. Instead of that, bothhis look and his tone carried some tinge of quiet yet dominantgentility, reminding her, as she had so often been taught before, thatthe criminal is not a type in himself, that only fanciful andfar-stretched generalizations could detach him as a species, or immureand mark him off from the rest of his kind. 

She glanced at him still again, at the seemingly melancholic andcontemplative face, that strangely reminded her of Dürer's portrait ofhimself. As she did so there was carried to her memory, and imprintedon it, the picture of a wistful and lonely man, his countenancetouched, for all its open Irish smile, with some wordless sorrow, somepensive isolation of soul, lean and gaunt with some undefined hunger, alittle furtive and covert with some half-concealed restlessness. 

"Aren't you an American?" he was asking, almost hopefully, it seemed toher. 

"Oh, no, " she answered, with her sober, slow smile. "I'm anEnglishwoman!"

He shook his head, whimsically. 

"Indeed, I'm sorry for that!" said the Celt. 

She joined in his laugh. 

"But I've lived abroad so much!" she added. 

"Then you must know Italy pretty well, I suppose?"

"Oh, yes; I've traveled here, winter after winter. "

She picked out a card from her pocket-book, on which was inscribed, inSpencerian definiteness of black and white, "Miss Barbara Allen. " Ithad been the card of Lady Boxspur's eminently respectable maid--andFrances Durkin had saved it for just such a contingency. 

He read the name, slowly, and then placed the card in his vest pocket. If he noticed her smile, he gave no sign of it. 

"And you like Genoa? I mean, _is_ there anything to like in thisplace?" he asked companionably. "I'll be hanged if I've seen anythingbut a few million mementoes of Christopher Columbus!"

"There's the Palazzo Bianco, and the Palazzo Rosso, and, of course, there's the Campo Santo!"

"But who cares for graveyards?"

"All Europe is a graveyard, of its past!" she answered lightly. "Thatwas what I thought you Americans always came to see!"

He laughed a little, in turn, and she both liked him better for it andfound it easier to go on. She felt, from his silences, that no greatspan of his life had been spent in talking with women. And she wasglad of it. 

"I like the Riggi, " she added pregnantly. 

"The Riggi--what's that, please?"

"That's the restaurant up on the hill. " She hesitated and turned back, before unlocking her door. "It's charming!"

He was on the point, she knew, of making the plunge and asking if theymight not see the Riggi together, when something in her glance, someprecautionary chilliness of look, checked him. For she had seen thateven now things might advance too hurriedly. It would be wiser, and inthe long run it would pay, she warned herself, to draw in--for as shestill lingered and chatted with him she more and more felt that she wasface to face with a resourceful and strong-willed opponent. Shenoticed, through all the outward Celtic gentleness, the grim andpassionate mouth, the keenness of the shifty yet penetrating hazel-grayeyes, the touch of almost bull-dog tenaciousness about theloose-jointed, high-shouldered figure, and, above all, the audacity ofthe careless Irish-American smile. That smile, she felt, trailed likea flippant and fluttering tail to the kite of his racial solemnity andstubbornness of purpose, enabling it to rise higher even while seemingto weigh it down. 

"And you always travel alone?" he finally asked, shaking off the lastof his reserve. 

"Oh, I'm a bit of a globe-trotter--that's what you'd call me on yourside of the ocean, isn't it? You see, I go about Southern Europepicking up things for a London art firm!"

"And where do you go next?"

"Oh, perhaps to Milan, perhaps to Naples; it may even be to Rome, or itmight turn out to be Syracuse or Taormina. With me, everythingdepends, first on the weather, and, next, on what instructions are senton. "

She inwardly marveled at the glibness and spontaneity with which thewords fell from her tongue. She even took a sort of secret joy in thedramatic values which that scene of play-acting presented to her. 

"And do you ever go to New York?"

"Yes, such a thing might happen, any time. "

It was as well, she told herself, to leave the way well paved. 

"_That's_ the city for you!" he declared, with a commending shake ofthe head. 

Of the truth of that fact Frances Durkin was only too well aware; butthis was a conviction to which she did not give utterance. 

As they stood chatting together in the deserted hallway, a man, turningthe corner, brushed by them. He merely gave them one casual glance ofinquiry, and then looked away, apparently at the room-numbers on thelintels. 

The young woman chanced to be tapping half-carelessly, half-nervously, with her key on the panel of her door. It meant nothing to hercomrade, but to the passing man it resolved itself into an intelligibleand coherent message. For it was in Morse, and to his trained andadept ear it read: "This--is--Keenan--keep--away!"

CHAPTER XI

THE INTOXICATION OF WAR

It was two days later, --and they had been days of blank suspense forhim, --that Durkin made his way to Frank's room, unobserved. His firstresolution had been to wait for a clearer coast, but his anxiety overcamehim, and he could hold off no longer. 

As he opened the door and stepped noiselessly inside he caught sight ofher by the window, her face ruminative and in repose. It looked, for themoment, unhappy and tired and hard. She seemed to stand before him witha mask off, a designing and disillusioned woman, no longer in love withthe game of life. Or it was, he imagined, as she would look ten yearslater, when her age had begun to tell on her, and her still buoyantfreshness was gone. It was the same feeling that had come to him on theAngiolina steps, at Abbazia. He even wondered if in the stress of thelife they were now following she would lose the last of her good looks, if even her ever-resilient temperament would deaden and harden, and nolonger rise supreme to the exacting moment. Or could it be that she wasacting a part for him? that all this fine _bravado_ was an attitude, arôle, a pretense, taken on for his sake? Could it be--and the suddenthought stung him to the quick--that she was deliberately and consciouslydegrading herself to what she knew was a lower plane of thought and life, that the bond of their older companionship might still remain unsevered?

But, as her startled eyes caught sight of him, a welcoming light cameinto her relaxed face. With her first spoken word some earlier touch ofmoroseness seemed to slip away from her. If it required an effort toshake herself together, she gave no outward sign of it. She had promisedthat there should be no complaining and no hesitations from her; andDurkin knew she would adhere to that promise, to the bitter end. 

She went to him, and clung to him, a little hungrily. There seemedsomething passionate in her very denial of passion. For when he liftedher drooping head, with all its wealth of chestnut shot through withpaler gold, and gazed at her upturned face between his two hands, with alittle cry of endearment, she shut her mouth hard, on a sob. 

"You're back--and safe?" he asked. 

She forced a smile. 

"Yes, back safe and sound!"

"But tired, I know?"

"Yes--a little. But--"

She broke off, and he could see that she was rising from her momentaryluxury of relaxation as a fugitive rises after a minute's breathing-spell. 

"Well?" he asked anxiously. 

"_Pobloff has found us_!" she said, in her quiet contralto. 

"He's here, you mean?"

"He's in Genoa. I caught sight of him in a cab, hurrying from the FrenchConsulate to the Cafe Jazelli. I slipped into a silversmith's shop, ashe raced past, and escaped him. "

"And then what?"

"Then several things happened. But first, tell me this: did you get achance to look over Keenan's room?"

"I was bolted inside twenty minutes after you and he had left the hotel. His trunk was even unlocked; I looked through everything!"

"Which, of course, was charming work!" she interpolated, with notungentle scorn. 

He shrugged his shoulders deprecatively. "Not quite as charming asdining with your new friend!"

"I almost like him!" admitted the woman frankly, femininely rejoicing atthe note of jealousy in the other's voice. 

"And no worse than some of the work we've done, or may soon have to do!"

Then he went on, with rising passion: "And I'll tell you this, Frankwhatever we do, and whatever we have to go through, we've got to getthose securities out of Keenan! We've got to have them, now! We've gotto pound at it, and dog him, and fight him, and outwit him, until weeither win or lose and go under! It's a big game, and it has big risks, but we're in it too deep, now, to talk about drawing back, or to complainabout the dirty work it leads to!"

"I wasn't complaining, " she reproved, in her dead voice. "I only spoke abald truth. But you don't tell me what you've found. "

"I got nothing--absolutely nothing; not one shred of information even. There's nothing in the room. It stands to reason, then, as I told youfrom the first, that he is carrying the papers about with him!"

"That will make it harder, " she murmured monotonously. "And you're sureyour telegram has sent the Scotland Yard men to Como?"

"It must have, or we'd be running into them. The New Yorker is aPinkerton man. "

He started pacing back and forth in front of her, frowning with mingledirritation and impatience. 

"Then what about Pobloff?" he suddenly asked. 

"Five minutes after we had stepped out of the hotel he met us, face toface. With Keenan, I had no chance of getting away. So I simply facedit out. Then Pobloff shadowed us to the Riggi, watched us all throughluncheon, and followed us down to the city again. And here's the strangepart of it all. Keenan saw that we were being shadowed, from the first, and I could see him fretting and chafing under it, for he imagines thatit's all because of what he's carrying with him. So, on the other hand, Pobloff has concluded Keenan and I are fellow-conspirators, for he let mego to the lift alone, just to keep his eye on Keenan, who told me he hadbusiness at the steamship agency. "

"But why should we be afraid of Pobloff, then?"

"It's a choice of two evils, I should venture to say. But that's notall. As soon as I was free from each of them, and had left them there, carrying out that silent and ridiculous advance and retreat between them, I had to think both hard and fast. I decided that the best thing for meto do would be to slip down to Rome, at once, and make my visit to theEmbassy. "

"Yes, I found your note, telling me that. "

"When I saw that I was being followed at the station I bought a ticketfor Busalla, as a blind, and went in one door of my compartment and thenout the other. My _wagon lit_ was standing on the next track. I didn'tchange from the one train to the other until the train for Rome startedto move. Then I slipped out, and jumped for the moving platform, and wasbundled into my right carriage by a guard, who thought I was trying tocommit an Anna Karenina suicide--until I gave him ten francs. Whether Igot away unnoticed or not I can't say for sure. But Pobloff will haveresources here that we know nothing of. From now on, you may be sure, hewill have Keenan watched by one of his agents, night and day!"

"Then, good heavens, we've got to step in and save Keenan from Pobloff!"

"It amounts to that, " admitted Frank. "Yet, in some way, if we couldonly manage it, the two of them ought to fight our battle out for us, between themselves!"

"That's true--but _did_ you get to Rome?"

"Yes, without trouble. "

"And you got the money?"

"Only half of it. They hedged, and said the other half could not be paiduntil Pobloff's arrest. Jim, we must be on our guard against that man. "

"Pobloff doesn't count!" ejaculated Durkin impatiently. "It's Keenan wehave to have our fight with--_he's_ the man, the offender, wewant!--_that_ means only two hundred and fifty pounds!"

"But that is money honestly made!"

"And so will this be money honestly made. The one was legalized by thegovernment authority; the other, in the end, will be recognized as--well, as detectional and punitive expediency. That's why I say Pobloff doesn'tcount!"

"But Pobloff _does_ count, " persisted Frank. "He's a vindictive andresourceful man, and he has a score against us to wipe out. Besides allthat, he's a master of intrigue, and he has the entire secret service ofFrance behind him, and he knows underground Europe as well as any spy onthe Continent. He will keep at us, I tell you, until he thinks he iseven!"

"Then let him--if he wants to, " scoffed Durkin. "My work is with Keenan. If Pobloff tries interfering with us, the best thing we can do is to getthe British Foreign Office after him. _They_ ought to be big enough forhim!"

"It's not a matter of bigness. _He_ won't fight that way. He wouldnever fight in the open. He knows his chances, and the country, and justwhere to turn, and just how far to go--and where to hide, if he has to!"

"That's true enough, I suppose. But oh, if I only had him in New York, I'd fight him to a finish, and never edge away from him and keep on therun this way!"

"Of course; but, as you say, is it worth while? After all, he's only anaccident in the whole affair now, though a disagreeable one. And, what'smore, Pobloff will never follow us out of Europe. This is his stampingground. He had misfortune in America, and he's afraid of it. As I saidbefore, Pobloff and Keenan are the acid and the alkali that ought to makethe neutral salts. I mean, instead of trying to save them from eachother, we ought to fling them together, in some way. Let Pobloff do thehunting for us--then let us hunt Pobloff!"

"But Keenan is wary, and shrewd, and far-seeing. How is he to be caught, even by a Pobloff?"

"That only time and Pobloff can tell. It will never be bybrigandage--Keenan will never go far enough afield to give him a chancefor that. But I feel it in my bones--I feel that there is dangerimpending, for us all. "

Durkin turned and looked at her, wondering if her woman's intuition wasto penetrate deeper into the unknown than his own careful analysis. 

"What danger?" he asked. 

"Impending dangers cease to be dangers when they can be defined. It'snothing more than a feeling. But the strangest part of the wholesituation is the fact that not one of us, from any corner of thetriangle, dares turn to the police for one jot of protection. None of uscan run crying to the arms of constituted authority when we get hurt!"

A consciousness of their lonely detachment from their kind, of theirisolation, crept through Durkin's mind. He felt momentarily depressed bya sense of friendlessness. It was like reverting to primordialconditions, wherein it was ordained that each life, alone and unassisted, should protect and save itself. He wondered if primitive man, or if evenwild animals, did not always walk with that vague consciousness ofcontinual menace, where lupine viciousness seemed eternally at war withvulpine wariness. 

"Then what would you suggest?" he asked the woman, who sat before himrapt in thought. 

"That we watch Keenan, continuously, night and day. He has been huntedand followed now for over two months, and he is only waiting for a clearfield to take to his heels. And when he goes he is going for America. That I know. If we lose sight of him, we lose our chance. "

Durkin walked to the window, and looked out at the tiled roofs and thesquat chimney-pots, above which he could catch a glimpse of burstingsky-rockets and the glow of Greek fire from the narrow canyons of thestreets below. 

"What are all the fireworks for?" he asked her casually. 

"It's a Saint's Day, of some sort, they told me at the office, " sheexplained. 

He was about to turn and speak to her again, after a minute's silence, when a low knock sounded on the door. He remained both silent andmotionless, and the knock was repeated. 

"In a moment!" called the woman, as she motioned Durkin to the door ofher clothes-closet. He drew back, with a shake of the head. He revoltedmomentarily against the ignominy of the movement. But she caught him bythe arm and thrust him determinedly in, closing the door on him. Thenshe hurriedly let her wealth of chestnut hair tumble about her shoulders. Then she answered the knock, with the loosened strands of chestnut in oneabashed hand. 

It was Keenan himself who stood in the hall before her. 

CHAPTER XII

THE DOORWAY OF SURPRISE

"May I speak to you a moment?" asked Keenan, taking a step nearer to heras he spoke. She seemed able, even under his quiet composure, to detectsome note of alarm. 

"Will you come in?" she asked, holding the door wide for him. 

"If you don't mind the intrusion. "

She had closed the door, and stood facing him, interrogatively. 

"What I am going to ask you, Miss Allen, is something unusual. But thispast week has shown me that you are an unusual woman. " He hesitated, indoubt as to how to proceed. 

"In America, " she said, laughing a little, to widen his avenue ofapproach, "you would call me emancipated, wouldn't you?"

He bowed and laughed a little in return. 

"But let me explain, " he went on. "I am in what you might call adilemma. For some reason or other certain persons here are watching andfollowing me, night and day. In America--which, thank God, is a land oflaw and order--this sort of thing wouldn't disturb me. But here"--hegave a little shrug--"well, you know what they say about Italy!"

"Then I wasn't mistaken!" she cried, with a well-rung note of alarm. 

He looked at her, narrowly. 

"Ah, I suspected you'd have an inkling! But what I have here makes thecase exceptional--and, perhaps, a little dangerous!"

He drew from his pocket a yellow-tinted manila envelope, of "legal" size. Frank's quick glance told her that it was by no means empty. 

"It may sound theatrical, and you may laugh at me, but will you takepossession of these papers for me, for a few days? No, let me explainfirst. They are important, I confess, for, although valuelesscommercially, they contain personal and private letters that are worth agood deal to me!"

"But this means a great responsibility, " demurred Frank. 

"Yes; but no danger--at least to you, since you are in no way undersuspicion. You said that in five days you would probably be in Naples. Supposing that I arrange to meet you at, say, the Hôtel de Londres there, and then repay you for your trouble. "

"But it's so unusual; so almost absurd, " still demurred the acting woman. The eavesdropper from the closet felt that it was an instance of diamondcutting diamond. How hard and polished and finished, he thought, actorand actress confronted each other. 

"Will you take the risk?" the man was asking. 

She looked from him to the packet and then back to him again. 

"Yes, if you insist--if it is really helping you out!" she replied, withstill simulated bewilderment. 

He thanked her with something more than his professional, placidcrispness, and put the packet in her outstretched hand. 

"Is that all?"

"Yes, everything. "

"In Naples, in five days?"

"Yes; the Hôtel de Londres. And now I must leave you. "

He startled her by taking her hand and wringing it. She was stilllooking down at the packet as he withdrew, and the door closed behind him. 

She listened for a moment, and then turned the key in the lock. Durkin, stepping from his place of concealment, confronted her. They stoodgazing at each other in blank astonishment. 

Frank's first impulse was to tear open the envelope. But on secondthoughts she flew to her alcohol tea-lamp and lighted the flame. It wasonly a minute or two before a jet of steam came from the tiny kettlespout. Over this she shifted and held the gummed envelope-flap, untilthe mucilage softened and dissolved. Then, holding her breath, shepeeled back the flap, and from the envelope drew three soiled butcarefully folded copies of the London _Daily Chronicle_. The envelopeheld nothing more. 

A little cry of disappointment escaped Durkin, while Frank turned thepapers over in her fingers, in speechless amazement. The very audacityof the man swept her off her feet. 

It was both a warning and a challenge, grim with its suggestiveness, eloquent with careless defiance. That was her first thought. 

"The fool--he's making fun of you!" said Durkin, with a second passionateoath. 

Frank was slowly refolding the papers, and replacing them in the envelope. 

"I don't believe that's it, " she said, meditatively. "I believe he istrying me--making this a test!"

She carefully moistened the gum and resealed the envelope, so that itbore no trace of having revealed its contents. She stood gazing at herhusband with studious and unseeing eyes. 

"If he comes back I'll know that I am right, " she cried, with suddenconviction. "If he finds that I am still here, and that his packet isstill intact and safe, he'll do what he wants to do. And that is, he'lltrust me with the whole of his securities!"

She quenched the alcohol flame and replaced the lamp in its case. 

"If he comes back, " mocked Durkin. "Do you know what you and I ought tobe doing, at this moment? We ought to be following that man every stephe takes. "

"But where?" She shook her head, slowly, in dissent. 

"That's for us to find out. But can't you feel that he's left us in thelurch, that we're shut up here, while he's giving us the laugh andgetting away?"

"Jim, listen to me. During this past week I've seen more of Keenan thanyou have. "

"Yes, a vast sight more!" he interjected, heatedly. 

"And I feel sure, " she went on evenly, "that he is more frightened andworried than he pretends to be. He is, after all, only a tricky andferrety Irish lawyer, who is afraid of every power outside his own littlecircuit of experience. He's afraid of Italy. I suppose he hasnightmares about _brigantaggio_, even! He's afraid of foreigners--afraidof this sort of conspiracy of silence that seems surrounding him. He'seven afraid to take his precious documents and put them in a safe-depositvault in any one of the regularly established institutions here in Genoa. There are plenty of them, but he isn't big and bold enough to do hisbusiness that way. He's been a fugitive so long his only way of warfarenow is flight. And besides, he can never forget that his work isunderground and illicit. That is why he carries his documents about withhim, on him, in his pockets, like a sneak thief with a pocketful ofstolen goods. I don't mean to say that he isn't smooth and crafty, andthat he won't fight like a rat when he's cornered! But I do believe thatif he and Penfield could get in touch today, here in Genoa, he would handover every dollar of those securities, and give up the job, and get backto his familiar old lairs among the New York poolrooms and wardheelersand petty criminals where he knows his enemies and his friends!"

Durkin strode toward the door impatiently. He hesitated for a moment, but had already stretched out his hand to turn the key when he drew back, silently, step by step. 

For a second time, on the panel, without, the low knock was sounding. 

Frank watched the closet door draw to and close on Durkin; then shecalled out, with assumed and cheery unconcern, "Come in. "

She did not look up for a moment, for she was still busy with her hair. 

The door opened and closed. 

"I trust I do not intrude?"

Frank's brush fell from her hand, before she even slowly wheeled andlooked, for it was the suave and well-modulated baritone of Pobloff. 

"What does this mean?" she demanded vacantly, retreating before hissteady and scornful gaze. 

"Simply, madam, that you and I seem seldom able to anticipate eachother's calls!"

She made a pretense of going to the electric signal. 

"It is quite useless, " explained the Russian quietly. "The wires aredisconnected. "

He took out his watch and glanced at it. "Indeed, as a demonstrationthat others enjoy privileges which you sometimes exert, in two minutesevery light in this room will be cut off!"

The woman was panting a little by this time, for her thoughts were ofDurkin and his danger, as much as of herself. She struggled desperatelyto regain her self-possession, for there was no mistaking the quiet butgrim determination written on the Russian's pallid face. And she knew hewas not alone in whatever plot he had laid. 

She would have spoken, only the sudden flood of blackness that submergedher startled her into silence. The lights had gone out. 

She demanded of herself quickly, what should be her first move. 

While she stood in momentary suspense, a knock sounded still once more onher door. 

"Come in, " she called out quickly, loudly, now alert and alive to everymovement. 

It was Keenan who stepped in from the half-lighted hall. He would havepaused, in involuntary amazement, at the utter darkness that greeted him, only footsteps approaching and passing compelled him to act quickly. 

He stepped inside and closed and locked the door. 

She had not been mistaken. He _had_ come back. 

CHAPTER XIII

"THE FOLLY OF GRANDEUR"

There flashed through Frances Durkin's mind, in the momentary silencethat fell over that strange company, the consciousness that thetriangle was completed; that there, in one room, through afortuitousness that seemed to her more factitious than actual, stoodthe three contending and opposing forces. The thought came and wentlike a flash, for it was not a time for meditation, but for hurried anddesperate action. The sense of something vast and ominous seemed tohang over the darkness, where, for a second or two, the silence ofabsolute surprise reigned. 

The last-comer, too, seemed to feel this sense of something impending, for a moment later his voice rang out, clear and unhesitating, with atouch of challenge in it. 

"Miss Allen, are you here? And is anything wrong?"

"Stand where you are!" the voice of the woman answered, through thedarkness, firm and clear. "Yes. I am here. But there is anotherperson in this room. He is a man who means harm, I believe, to both ofus!"

"Ah!" said the voice near the door. 

The woman was speaking again, her voice high and nervous, from thecontinued suspense of that darkness and silence combined, a dualmystery from which any bolt might strike. 

"Above all things, " she warned him, "you must watch that door!"

Her straining ears heard a quiet click-click; she had learned of oldthe meaning of that pregnant sound. It was the trigger of a revolverbeing cocked. 

"All right--I'm ready, " said the man at the door, grimly. Then helaughed, perhaps a little uneasily. "But why are we all in darknessthis way?"

"The wires have been cut--that is a part of his plan!"

Keenan took a step into the room and addressed the black emptinessbefore him. 

"Will the gentleman speak up and explain?"

No answer came out of the darkness. Frank knew, by this time, thatKeenan would make no move to desert her. 

"Have you a lamp, or a light of any kind, Miss Allen?" was the nextcurt, businesslike question. 

"Oh, be careful, sir!" she warned him, now in blind and unreasoningterror. 

"Have you a light?" repeated Keenan authoritatively. 

"I have only an alcohol lamp; it gives scarcely any light--it is forboiling a teapot!"

"Then light it, please!"

"Oh, I dare not!" she cried, for now she was possessed of theunreasoning fear that one step in any direction would bring her incontact with death itself. 

"Light it, please!" commanded Keenan. "Nothing will happen. I have inmy hand here, where I stand, a thirty-eight calibre revolver, loadedand cocked. If there is one movement from the gentleman you speak of, I will empty it into him!"

Both Keenan and Frank started, and peered through the blackness. For acareless and half-derisive, half-contemptuous laugh sounded through theroom. Pobloff, obviously, had never moved from where he stood. 

Frank slowly groped to the wall of her room, and felt with blind andexploring hands until she came to her bureau. Then sounded the clinkof nickel as the lamp was withdrawn from its case and the dry rattle ofGerman safety-matches. Then the listeners heard the quick scrape andflash of the match against the side of the little paper box, and thepuff of the wavering blue flame as the match-end came in contact withthe alcohol. 

After all, it was good to have a light! Incongruously it flashedthrough her mind, as wayward thoughts and ideas would at such moments, how relieved primitive man amid his primitive night must have been atthe blessed gift of the first fire. 

The wavering blue flame widened and heightened. In a moment the inkyroom was pallidly suffused with its trembling half-light. Outside, through the night, sounded muffled street noises, and the boom and hissand spurt of fireworks. 

The two peering faces turned slowly, until their range of vision hadswept the entire room. Then they paused, for motionless against thewest wall, between the closet door and the corner, stood Pobloff. Hisarms were folded, and he was laughing a little. 

Frank drew nearer Keenan, instinctively, wondering what the nextmovement would be. 

It was Pobloff's voice that first broke the silence. 

"This woman lies, " he said, in his suavely scoffing baritone. "Thiswoman----"

"Why don't you say something--why don't you do something!" cried Frank, hysterically, turning to Keenan. 

"Ring the bell!" commanded Keenan. 

"It's useless--the wires are cut, " she panted. She could see that, above and beyond all his craftiness, his latent Irish fighting-bloodwas aroused. 

"Then, by God, I'll put him out myself. If there's any fight betweenhim and me "--he turned on Pobloff--"we won't drag a woman into it!"

The tall, gaunt Russian against the wall was no longer laughing. 

"Pardon me, " he said, advancing a step. "This woman has in herpossession a packet of papers--of personal and private papers, whichconcern neither you nor her!"

"But what if it _does_ concern me?" demanded Keenan. 

"The gentleman is talking nonsense, " said Pobloff, unperturbed. Yet heleaned forward and studied him more closely, through the half-light, studied him as the deliberating terrier might study the captured ratthat had dared to bite back at him. "This woman, I repeat, has certainpapers about her!"

"And what of that?" cried Keenan blindly. Frank saw, to her joy, thathe was misled. 

"Simply this: that if the lady I speak of hands those papers to me, here, the matter is closed, for all time!"

"And if she doesn't?"

"Then she will do so later!"

A grunt of sheer rage broke from Keenan's lips. But he checked it, suddenly, and wheeled on the woman. 

"Give him the package, " he ordered. She hesitated, for at the momentthe thought of Keenan's trust had passed from her mind. 

"Do as I say, " he repeated curtly. 

Frank, remembering, drew the yellow manila envelope from her bosom, andwith out-stretched arm handed it to Pobloff. 

The Russian took it in silence. Then with a few quick strides headvanced to the alcohol lamp. As he did so both Keenan and Franknoticed for the first time the blunt little gun-metal revolver he heldin his right hand. 

"Again you will pardon me, " said Pobloff, with his ever-scoffingcourtliness. "A mere glance will be necessary, to make sure that weare not--mistaken!"

He tore open the envelope with one long forefinger, and stooped to drawforth the contents. 

It was then that Keenan sprang at him. Frank at the moment, wasmarveling at the unbroken continuity of evidence linking her with heruncomprehending opponent. 

The sudden leap and cry of Keenan sent a tingle of apprehension up anddown her body. She asked herself, vaguely, if all the rest of her lifewas to be made up of this brawling and fighting in unlighted chambersof horror; if, now that they were in the more turgid currents for whichthey had longed, there were to come no moments of peace amid all theirtumult and struggling. 

Then she drew in her breath with a little gasp, for she saw Pobloff, with a quick writhe of his thin body, free his imprisoned right arm, and strike with the metal butt of his revolver. 

He struck twice, three times, and the sound of the metal on theunprotected head was sickening to the listening woman. She staggeredto the closet door as the man fell to the floor, stunned. 

"Jim! 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 rippedopen Keenan's coat and vest, and from a double-buttoned pocket on theinside of the inner garment was drawing out a yellow manila envelope, the fellow to that which had already been thrust into his hands. Itwas then that Durkin sprang forward. 

Pobloff saw him advance. He had only time to reverse his hold on thelittle gun-metal revolver and fire two shots. 

The first shot went wide, tearing deep into the plastered wall. Thesecond cut through the flap of his assailant's coat-pocket, just overthe left hip, scattering little flecks of woollen cloth about. Butthere was no time for a third shot. 

It seemed brutal to Frank, but she allowed herself time for neitherthought nor scruples. All she remembered was that it wasnecessary--though once again she asked herself if all her life, fromthat day on, was to be made up of brawling and fighting. 

For Durkin had brought down on the half-turned head the up-poisedbedroom chair with all his force. Pobloff, with a little inarticulatecry that was almost a grunt, buckled and pitched forward. 

"That settles _you_!" the stooping man said, heartlessly, as he watchedhim relax and half roll on his side. 

Frank watched him, too, but with no sense of triumph or success, withno emotion but slowly awakening disgust, against which she found ituseless to struggle. She watched him with a sense of detachment andaloofness, as if looking down on him from a great height, while he toreupon the manila envelope and gave vent to a little cry of satisfaction. They at last possessed the Penfield securities. Then she went over andreplenished the waning flame in the alcohol lamp. 

"We've got to get away from here now, " said Durkin quickly. "And thesooner the better!"

She looked about her, a little helplessly. Then she glanced at Keenan. "See, he's coming to!"

"Are you ready?" Durkin demanded sharply. 

"Yes, " she answered, in her dead and resigned voice, as she took up herhat and coat. "But where are we going?"

"I'll tell you on the way down. Only you must get what you want, andhurry!"

"But is it safe now?" she demurred, "and for _you_?"

He thought for a moment, with his hand on the doorknob. Then he turnedback. 

"You'd better keep this, then, until I find what we have to face, outside here!"

He passed into her hand the manila envelope, and stepped out into thehall. 

A moment later she had secreted the packet, along with Pobloff'srevolver, which she picked up from the floor. Then she ran to thedoor, and locked it. She would fight like a hornet, now, she inwardlyvowed, for what she held. 

Then she caught her breath, behind the locked door, for the sounds thatcrept in from the hallway told her that her fear had not beengroundless. 

She heard Durkin's little choked cry of pain and surprise, for he hadbeen seized, she knew, and pinned back against the door. It wasPobloff's men, she told herself. They had him by the throat, she knewby the sound of the guttural oaths which they were trying to chokeback. She could hear the kick and scrape of feet, the movement of hiswrithing and twisting body against the door, as on a sounding-board. She surmised that they had his arms held, otherwise he would surelyhave used his revolver. She was conscious of a sort of wild joy at thethought that he could not, for they were going through him, from thequieted sounds, pocket by pocket, and she knew he would have shot themif he could. 

"There's nothing here!" said a voice in French. Frank, listening soclose to them, could hear the three men breathe and pant. 

"Then the woman has it!" answered the other voice, likewise in French. 

"Shut up! She'll get on!" And Frank could hear them tear and haul atDurkin as they dragged him down the hall--just where, she could notdistinguish. 

She ran over to Keenan and shook him roughly. He looked at her alittle stupidly, but did not seem able to respond to her entreaties. 

"Quick!" she whispered, "or it will be too late!"

She flung her pitcher of water in his face and over his head, andpoured brandy from her little leather-covered pocket-flask down histhroat. 

That seemed to revive him, for he sat up on the carpeted floor, mumblingly, and glowered at her. Then he remembered; and as she bathedhis bruised head with a wet towel he caught at her hand foolishly. 

"Have we lost them?" he asked huskily, childishly. 

"No, they are here! See, intact, and safe. But you must take themback. Neither of us can go through that hall with them!"

"Why not?"

"We're watched--we're prisoners here!"

"Then what'll we do?" he asked weakly, for he was not yet himself. 

"You must take them, and get out of this room. There is only one way!"

"What is it?"

"You see this rope. It's meant for a fire-escape. You must letyourself down by it. You'll find yourself in a court, filled withempty barrels. That leads into a bake-shop--you can see the ovenlights and smell the bread. Give the man ten _lira_, and he's sure tolet you pass. Can you do it? Do you understand?"

"Yes, " he said, still a little bewildered. "But where will I meet you?"

She pondered a moment. 

"In Trieste, a week from tomorrow. But can you manage the rope?"

He laughed a little. "I ought to! I've been through a poolroom raidor two, over home!"

"In Trieste then, a week from morrow!"

She handed him her brandy-flask. 

"You may need it, " she explained. He was on his feet by this time, struggling to pull himself together. 

"But you can't face that alone, " he remonstrated, with a thumb-jerktoward the hall. "I won't see you touched by those damned rats!"

"'Ssssh!" she warned him. "They can't do anything to me now, exceptsearch me for those papers!"

"But even that!"

"I'll wait until I see you're safely down, then I'll run for thestairs. They've shut off all the lights outside, in this wing, but ifthey in any way attempt to ill-treat me, before I get to the maincorridor, I'll scream for help!"

"But even to search you"--began Keenan again. 

"Yes, I know!" she answered evenly. "It's not pleasant. But I'll faceit"--she turned her eyes full upon him--"for you!"

They listened for a moment together at the opened window. The redlights were still burning here and there about the city in the streetsbelow, and the carnival-like cries and noises still filled the air. 

And she watched him anxiously as he and his packet of documents wentdown the dangling hemp rope, reached the stone paving of the littlecourt, and disappeared in the square of light framed by the bake-shopwindow. 

Then she turned back into the room, startled by a weak and waveringgroan from Pobloff. She went to him, and tried to lift him up on thebed, but he was too heavy for her overtaxed strength. She wondered, asshe slipped a pillow under his head, why she should be afraid of him inthat comatose and helpless state--why even his white and passive facelooked so vindictive and sinister in the dim light of the room. 

But as he moved a little she started back, and caught up what thingsshe could fling into her Gladstone bag, and put out the light, andgroped her way across the room once more. 

Then she flung open the door and stepped out into the hall, with afeeling that her heart was in her mouth, choking her. 

She ceased running as she came to the bend in the hall, for she heardthe sound of voices, and the light grew stronger. She would havedodged back, but it was too late. 

Then she saw that it was Durkin, beside three jabbering andgesticulating Guardie di Pubblica Sicurezza. 

"Oh, there you are!" said his equable and tranquil voice, as he removedhis hat. 

She did not speak, accepting silence as safer. 

"I brought these gentlemen, for someone told me there was a drunkenEnglishman in the halls, annoying you, and I was afraid we might missour train!"

She looked at the _gendarmes_ and then on to the excited servants attheir heels, in bewilderment. She was to escape, then, in safety!

"Explain to these gentlemen just what it was, " she heard the warninglysuave voice of her husband saying to her, "while I hurry down and orderthe carriage!"

She was nervous and excited and incoherent, yet as they followed at herside down the broad marble staircase she made them understand dimlythat their protection was now unnecessary. No, she had not beeninsulted; not directly. But she had been affronted. It wasnothing--only the shock of seeing a drunken quarrel; it had alarmed andupset her. She paused, caught at the balustrade, then wavered alittle; and three solicitous arms in dark cloth and metal buttons werethrust out to support her. She thanked them, in her soft contralto, gratefully. The drive through the open air, she assured them, wouldrestore her completely. 

But all the while she was thinking how needlessly and blindly andfoolishly she had surrendered and lost a fortune. Her path of escapehad been an open one. 

 * * * * * *

"Won't they find out, and everything be known, before we can get to thestation?" she asked, as the fresh night air fanned her throbbing faceand brow. 

"Of course they will!" said Durkin. "But we're not going to thestation. We're going to the waterfront, and from there out to oursteamer!"

"For where?" she asked. 

"I scarcely know--but anywhere away from Genoa!"

CHAPTER XIV

AWAKENING VOICES

Frances Durkin's memory of that hurried flight from Genoa alwaysremained with her a confusion of incongruous and quickly changingpictures. She had a recollection of stepping from her cab into acrowded sailors' _café chantant_, of pushing past chairs and tables andhurrying out through a side door, of a high wind tearing at her hairand hat, as she and Durkin still hurried down narrow, stone-pavedstreets, of catching the smell of salt water and the musky odor ofshipping, of a sharp altercation with an obdurate customs officer inblue uniform and tall peaked cap, who stubbornly barred their way witha bare and glittering bayonet against her husband's breast, while sheglibly and perseveringly lied to him, first in French, and then inEnglish, and then in Italian. 

She remembered her sense of escape when he at last reluctantly allowedthem to pass, while they stumbled over railway tracks, and the roughstones of the quay pavement, and the bundles of merchandise lyingscattered about them. Then she heard the impatient lapping of water, and the outside roar of the waves, and saw the harbor lights twinklingand dancing, and caught sight of the three great white shafts of lightthat fingered so inquisitively and restlessly along the shipping andthe city front and the widening bay, as three great gloomy Italianmen-of-war played and swung their electric searchlights across thenight. 

Then came a brief and passionate scene with a harbor ferryman, whoscorned the idea of taking his boat out in such a sea, who eloquentlywaved his arms and told of accidents and deaths and disasters alreadybefallen the bay that night, who flung down his cap and danced on it, in an ecstasy of passionate argumentation. She had a memory of Durkinalmost as excited as the dancing harbor orator himself, raging up anddown the quay with a handful of Italian paper money between hisfingers, until the boatman relented. Then came a memory of tossing upand down in a black and windy sea, of creeping under a great shadowstippled with yellow lights, of grating and pounding against a ship'sladder, of an officer in rubber boots running down to her assistance, of more blinking lights, and then of the quiet and grateful privacy ofher own cabin, smelling of white-lead paint and disinfectants. 

She slept that night, long and heavily, and it was not until the nextmorning when the sun was high and they were well down the coast, thatshe learned they were on board the British coasting steamer _Laminian_, of the Gallaway & Papyani Line. They were to skirt the entire coast ofItaly, stopping at Naples and then at Bari, and then make their way upthe Adriatic to Trieste. These stops, Durkin had found, would bebrief, and the danger would be small, for the _Laminian_ was primarilyknown as a freighter, carrying out blue-stone and salt fish, and on herreturn cruise picking up miscellaneous cargoes of fruit. So herpassenger list, which included, outside of Frank and Durkin, only aconsumptive Welsh school-teacher and a broken-down clergyman fromBirmingham, who kept always to his cabin, was in danger of noover-close scrutiny, either from the Neapolitan Guardie Municipali onthe one hand, or from any private agents of Keenan and Penfield on theother. 

Even one short day of unbroken idleness, indeed, seemed to make lifeover for both Frank and Durkin. Steeping themselves in thatcomfortable sense of security, they drew natural and easy breath oncemore. They knew it was but a momentary truce, an interregnum ofindolence; but it was all they asked for. They could no longer nurseany illusions as to the trend of their way or the endlessness of theirquest. They must now always keep moving. They might alter the mannerof their progression, they might change their stroke, but thecontinuity of effort on their part could no more be broken than couldthat of a swimmer at sea. They must keep on, or go down. 

So, in the meantime, they plucked the day, with a touch of wistfulnessborn of their very distrust of the morrow. 

The glimmering sapphire seas were almost motionless, the days andnights were without wind, and the equable, balmy air was like that ofan American mid-summer, so that all of the day and much of the nightthey spent on deck, where the Welsh schoolmaster eyed them covertly, asa honeymoon couple engulfed in the selfish contentment of their owngreat happiness. It reminded Frank of earlier and older days, for, with the dropping away of his professional preoccupations, Durkinseemed to relapse into some more intimate and personal relationshipwith her. It was the first time since their flight from America, shefelt, that his affection had borne out the promise of its earlierardor. And it taught her two things. One was that her woman's naturalhunger for love was not so dead as she had at times imagined. Theother was that Durkin, during the last months, had drifted much furtheraway from her than she had dreamed. It stung her into a passionate andremorseful self-promise to keep closer to him, to make herself alwaysessential to him, to turn and bend as he might bend and turn, butalways to be with him. It would lead her downward and still furtherdownward, she told herself. But she caught solace from some blindbelief that all women, through some vague operation of theiraffectional powers, could invade the darkest mires of life, if only itwere done for love, and carry away no stain. In fact, what would be ablemish in time would almost prove a thing of joy and pride. And inthe meantime she was glad enough to be as happy as she was, and to benear Durkin. It was not the happiness she had once looked for, but itsufficed. 

They caught sight of a corner of Corsica, and on the following nightcould see the glow of the iron-smelting fires on Elba, and the twinkleof the island shore-lights. From the bridge, too, through one of theofficers' glasses, Frank could see, far inland across the PontineMarshes, the gilded dome of St. Peter's, glimmering in the pellucidmorning sunlight. 

She called Durkin, and pointed it out to him. 

"See, it's Rome!" she cried, with strangely mingled feelings. "It'sSt. Peter's!"

"I wish it was the Statue of Liberty and New York, " he said, moodily. 

She realized, then, that he was not quite so happy as he had pretendedto be. And she herself, from that hour forward, shared in his secretunrest. For as time slipped away and her eye followed the heighteningline of the Apennines, she knew that tranquil Tyrrhenian Sea would notlong be left to her. 

It was evening when they rounded the terraced vineyards of Ischia. Alow red moon shone above the belching pinnacle of Vesuvius. Frank andDurkin leaned over the rail together, as they drifted slowly up thebay, the most beautiful bay in all the world, with its twilight soundsof shipping, its rattle of anchor chains, its far-off cries and echoes, and its watery, pungent Southern odors. 

They watched the ship's officer put ashore to obtain _pratique_, andthe yellow flag come down, and heard the signal-bells of theengine-room, as the officer returned, with a great cigar in one cornerof his bearded mouth. 

There was nothing amiss. There were neither Carabinieri nor Guardie diPubblica Sicurezza to come on board with papers and cross-questions. Before the break of day their discharged cargo would be in the lightersand they would be steaming southward for the Straits of Messina. 

That night, on the deserted deck, at anchor between the city and thesea, they watched the glimmering lights of Naples, rising tier aftertier from the _Immacolatella Nuova_ and its ship lamps to the _Palazzodi Capodimonte_ and its near-by _Osservatorio_. And when the lights ofthe city thinned out and the crowning haze of gold melted from itshillsides, with the advancing night, Frank and Durkin sat back in theirsteamer-chairs and looked up at the stars, talking of Home, and of thefuture. 

Yet the beauty of that balmy and tranquil night seemed to bring littlepeace of mind to Durkin. There were reasons, of late, when moments ofmeditation were not always moments of contentment to him. His wife hadnoticed that ever-increasing trouble of soul, and although she saidnothing of it, she had watched him narrowly and not altogetherdespondently. For she knew that whatever the tumult or contest thatmight be taking place within the high-walled arena of his own Ego, itwas a clash of forces of which she must remain merely a spectator. Soshe went below, leaving him in that hour of passive yet troubledthought, to stare up at the tranquil southern stars, as he meditated onlife, and the meaning of life, and what lay beyond it all. She knewmen and the world too well to look for any sudden and sweepingreorganization of Durkin's disturbed and restless mind. But she nursedthe secret hope that out of that spiritual ferment would come someultimate clearness of vision. 

It was late when he called her up on deck again, ostensibly to catch aglimpse of Vesuvius breaking and bursting into flame, above _Barra_ and_Portici_. She knew, however, that slumbering and subterranean firesother than Vesuvius had erupted into light and life. She could see itby the new misery on his moonlit face, as she sat beside him. Yet shesat there in silence; there was so little that she could say. 

"Do you know, you've changed, Frank, these last few months!" he at lastessayed. 

"Haven't there been reasons enough for it?" she asked, making no effortto conceal the bitterness of her tone. 

"You're not happy, are you?"

"Are _you_?" she asked, in turn. 

"Who can be happy, and think?"

She waited, passively, for him to go on again. 

"You said you didn't much care what happened, so long as it kept ustogether, and left us satisfied. "

"Isn't that enough?" she broke in, hotly, yet thrilling with thethought that he was about to tear away the mockery behind which she hadtried to mask herself. 

"No, it isn't enough! And now we're out of the dust of it, these lastfew days, I can see that it never can be enough. I've just beenwondering where it leads to, and what it amounts to. I've had afeeling, for days, now, that there's something between us. What is it?"

"Ourselves!" she answered, at last. 

"Exactly! And that is what makes me think you're wrong when you crythat you'll stoop every time I stoop. Every single crime that seems tobe bringing us together is only keeping us apart. It's making you hateyourself, and because of that, hate me as well!"

"I couldn't do _that_!" she protested, catching at his hands. 

"But I can see it with my own eyes, whether you want to or not. Itcan't be helped. It's beginning to frighten me, this very willingnessof yours to do the things we oughtn't to. Why, I'd be happier, even, if you did them under protest!"

"But what is the difference, if I still _do_ them?"

"It would show me that you weren't as bad as I am--that you hadn'taltogether given up. "

"I couldn't altogether give up, and live!" she cried, with suddenpassion. 

"But you told me as much, that night in Monte Carlo?"

"I didn't _mean_ it. I was tired out that night; I was embittered, andinsane, if you like! I _want_ to be good! No woman wants sin andwrongdoing! But, O Jim, can't you see, it's you, you, I want, beforeeverything else!"

He smote the palms of his hands together, in a little gesture ofimpotent misery. 

"That's just it--you tried to make me save myself for my own sake, --andit couldn't be done. It was a failure. And now you're trying to makeme save myself for your sake----"

"It's not your salvation I want--it's _you_!"

"But it's only through being honest that I can hold and keep you; can'tyou see that? If I can't trust myself, I can't possibly trust _you_!"

"Couldn't we try--once more?" Her voice was little more than a whisper. 

He looked up at the soft and velvet stars that peered down sovoluptuously from a soft and velvet sky. He looked at them for manymoments, before he spoke again. 

"If I got back to my work again, my right and honest work, I _could_ behonest!" he declared, vehemently. 

"But we _are_ going back, " she assuaged. 

"Yes, but see what we have to go through, first!"

"I know, " she admitted, unhappily. "But even then, we could say thatit was to be for the last time. "

"As we said before--and failed!"

"But this time we needn't fail. Think what it will mean if you haveyour work on your transmitting camera waiting for you--months and yearsof hard and honest work--work that you love, work that will lead tobigger things, and give you the time, yes, and the money, you need toperfect your amplifier. But outside of that, even to have yourwork--surely that's enough!"

"I'd have to have you, as well!" he said, out of the silence that hadfallen upon them. 

"You always will, Jim, you know that!"

"But I'm afraid of myself! I'm afraid of my moods--I'm afraid of myown distrust. I have a feeling that it may hurt you, sometime, almostbeyond forgiveness!"

"I'll try to understand!" she murmured. And again silence fell overthem. 

"I'm afraid of making promises, " he said, half whimsically, halfweakly, after many minutes of thought. 

"I don't want you to promise--only _try_!" she pleaded, swept by a waveof gratitude that seemed to fling her more intimately than ever beforeinto her husband's arms. Yet it was a wave, and nothing more. For itreceded as it came, leaving her, a moment later, chilled andapprehensive before their over-troubled future. With a little muffledcry of emotion, almost animal-like in its inarticulate intensity, sheturned to her husband, and strained him in her arms, in her human andunhappy and unsatisfied arms. 

"Oh, love me!" she pleaded, brokenly. "Love me! Love me--for I needit!"

They seemed strangely nearer to each other, after that night, and thepeacefulness of their cruise to Bari remained uninterrupted. And onceclear of that port Durkin's nervousness somewhat lightened, for he hadfigured out that they would be able to connect with one of the Cunardliners at Trieste. From there, if only they escaped attention anddetection in the harbor, they would be turning homeward in two days. 

One thing, and one thing only, lay between Frank and her husband: Shehad not yet found courage to tell him of the loss of the Penfieldpapers. And the more she thought of it, the more she dreaded it, teased and mocked by the very irony of the situation, disquieted andhumiliated at the memory of her own pleadings for honesty while sheherself was so far astray from the paths she was pointing out. 

That sacrifice of scrupulosity on the altar of expediency, trivial asit was, was the heritage of her past life, she told herself. And shefelt, vaguely, that in some form or another it would be paid for, anddearly paid for, as she had paid for everything. 

It was only as they steamed into the harbor of Trieste, in the teeth ofa _bora_ and a high-running sea, that this woman who longed to bealtogether honest allowed herself any fleeting moment of self-pity. For as she gazed up at the bald and sterile hills behind that clean andwind-swept Austrian city, she remembered they had been thus denudedthat their timbers might make a foundation for Venice. She felt, inthat passing mood, that her own life had been denuded, that all itssoftening and shrouding beauties had been cut out and carried away, that from now on she was to be torn by winds and scorched by opensuns--while the best of her slept submerged, beyond the reach of herunhappy hands. 

But Durkin, at her side, through the driving spray and rain, pointedout to her the huge rolling bulk and the red funnels of the Cunarder. 

"Thank heaven!" he said, with a sigh of relief, "we'll be in time tocatch her!"

The _Laminian_ dropped anchor to the windward of the liner, and as dusksettled down over the harbor Frank took a wordless pleasure in studyingthe shadowy hulk which was to carry her back to America, to her oldlife and her old associations. But she was wondering how she shouldtell him of the loss of the Penfield securities. It was true that thevery crimes that should have bound them together were keeping themapart!

Suddenly she ran to the companionway and called down to her husband. 

"Look!" she said, under her breath, as he came to the rail, "they'retalking with their wireless!"

She pointed to the masthead of the Cunarder, where, through thetwilight, she could "spell" the spark, signal by signal and letter byletter, as the current broke from the head of the installation wires tothe hollow metal mast, from which ran the taut-strung wires connecting, in turn, with the operating office just aft and above the engine-rooms. 

"Listen, " she said, for in the lull of the wind they could hear theshort, crisp spit of the spark as it spelt out its mysterious messages. 

Durkin caught her arm, and listened, intently, watching the littleappearing and disappearing green spark, spelling off the words withnarrowing eyes. 

"They're talking with the station up on the mainland. Do you hear whatit is? Can't you make it out?"

It was, of course, the Continental, and not the Morse, code, and it wasnot quite the same as stooping over and listening to the crisp, incisive pulsations of a "sounder. " But Frank heard and saw and piecedtogether enough of the message to clutch, in turn, at Durkin's arm, andwait with quickened breath for the answering spark-play. 

"No--such--persons--on--board--send--fuller--description. "

There was a silence of a minute or two, and then the mysteriousHertzian voice lisped out once more. 

"Description--not--forwarded--by--Embassy--man--and--wife--are wanted--for robbery--at--Monte--Carlo--also--at--Genoa--name--Durgin--or--Durkin. "

The listening man and woman looked at each other, and still waited. 

"Oh, this _is_ luck!" said the listener, fervently, as he drew a deepbreath. "This _is_ luck!"

"Listen, they're answering again!" cried Frank. 

"Why--not--confer--with--Trieste--authorities--will--you--please--telephone--our--agents--to--send--out--tender--to take--off--Admiral--Stuart. "

Then came the silence again. 

"Yes, " sounded the minute electric tongue from the mountain-top, somany miles away. "Good--night!"

"Good--night!" replied the articulate mass of heaving steel, swingingat her anchor chains. 

CHAPTER XV

WIRELESS MESSAGES

"What are we to do?" asked Frances Durkin, turning from the masthead toher husband's studious face. 

"We've got to jump at our chance, and get on board the _Slavonia_ overthere!"

"In the face of those messages?"

"It's the messages that simplify things for us. All we now have to dois to get on board in such a manner that the ship's officers will haveno suspicions. They mustn't dream of linking us with the runawaycouple who are being looked for. That means that we must not, in thefirst place, appear together, and, in the second, of course, that wemust travel and appear as utter strangers!"

"But supposing Keenan himself is on board that steamer?" parried Frank. 

"It is obvious that he isn't, for then it would be quite unnecessary tosend out any such messages by wireless. "

"But supposing it's Pobloff?"

"Didn't you say that Pobloff would never follow us out of Europe?"

"But even if it's Keenan?" she persisted. 

"Then you must remember that you are Miss Allen, at your old trade ofpicking up little art relics for wealthy families in England andAmerica. You will have yourself rowed directly over to the_Slavonia's_ landing ladder--you can see it there, not two hundred feetaway--and go on board and secure a stateroom from the purser. Theclearing papers can be attended to later. I'll have the _Laminian_dingey take me ashore, somewhere down near Barcola, if it can possiblybe done in this wind. Then I'll come out to the _Slavonia_ later, having, you see, just arrived on the train from Venice!"

She shook her head doubtfully. An inapposite and irrational dread ofseeing him return to the dangers of land took possession of her. Sheknew it would be impossible for her to put this untimely feeling intowords, so that he would see and understand it; and, such being thecase, she argued with him stubbornly to alter his plan, and to allowher to be the one to go ashore, while he went immediately to the liner. 

He consented to this at last, a little reluctantly, but the thoughtthat he was safely installed in his cabin, as she made her wayshoreward through the dusk, in the pitching and dripping little dingey, consoled her for the sense of loneliness and desertion which herposition brought to her. The wind had increased, by this time, and therain was coming down in slanting and stinging sheets. But her spiritdid not fail her. 

From the water-front, deserted and rain-swept, she called a passingstreet carriage, and drove to the Hotel Bristol. There she sent thedriver to ask if any luggage had arrived from Venice for Miss Allen. None had arrived, and Miss Allen, naturally, appeared in greatperturbation before the sympathetic but helpless hotel manager. Shenext inquired if it was possible to ascertain when the Cunard steamersailed. 

"The _Slavonia_, madam, leaves the harbor at daybreak!"

"At daybreak! Then I must go on board tonight, at once!"

"I fear it is impossible, madam. The _bora_ is blowing, as you see, and the harbor is empty!"

"But I _must_ get on board!" she cried, and this time her dismay anddespair were not mere dissimulation. 

The landlord shrugged his shoulders, while Frank, calling out aperemptory order, in Italian, to her driver, left him at the curblooking after her through the driving rain, in bewilderment. 

She went first to the steamship offices. They were closed. Then shesought out the Cunard tender--it was lightless and deserted. Then shehurried to the water-front, driving up and down along that lonelystretch of deserted quays, back and forth, coaxing, wheedling, tryingto bribe indifferent and placid-eyed boatmen to row her out to hersteamer. It was useless. It could not be done. It was not worthwhile to risk either their boats or their lives, even in the face ofthe fifty, one hundred, two hundred _lira_ which she flaunted in theirunperturbed faces. 

Grating and rocking against the quayside, above the heads of the groupabout her, she caught sight of a white-painted steam launch, with ahigh-standing bow, and on it a uniformed officer, smoking in the rain. 

She approached him without hesitation. Could he, in any way, carry herout to her steamer? She pointed to where the lights of the _Slavonia_shone and glimmered through the gray darkness. They lookedindescribably warm and homelike to her peering eyes. 

The officer looked her up and down in stolid Austrian amazement, tryingto catch a glimpse of her face through her wet and flattened travelingveil. Could he take her out to her steamer? No; he was afraid not. Yes, it was true he had steam up, and that his crew were aboard, butthis was the official patrol of the Captain of the Port--it was not tocarry passengers--it was solely for the imperial service of theAustrian Government. 

She pleaded with him, weeping. He was sorry, but the Captain of thePort would permit no such irregularity. 

"Where is the Captain of the Port, then?" she demanded. 

The officer puffed his cigar slowly, and looked her up and down oncemore. He was in his office in the Administration Building--but theofficer's shrug and smile told her that it was, in his eyes, no easything to secure admission to the Captain of the Port. The very phrase, "the Captain of the Port, " that had been bandied back and forth for thelast few minutes, became odious to her; it seemed to designate thetitle of some august and supernatural and tyrannous power who held herlife and death in his hands. 

She turned on her heel and drove at once to the AdministrationBuilding. Here, at the entrance, she was confronted by a uniformedsentry, who, after questioning her, passed her on to still anotheruniformed personage, who called an orderly, and sent that somewhatbewildered messenger and his charge to the anteroom of the Captain ofthe Port's private secretary. Frank had a sense of hurrying down longand jail-like corridors, of ascending stairs and passing sentries, ofquestionings and consultations, of at last being ushered into asoftly-lighted, softly-carpeted room, where a white-bearded, benignant-browed official sat in a swivel-chair before a high walnutdesk. 

He shook his head mournfully as he listened to her story. But she didnot give up. She even amazed him a little by the sheer impetuosity ofher speech. 

"Is there much at stake, _signorina_?" he asked, at last, as she pausedfor breath. 

"_A man's soul is at stake_!" was the answering cry that rang throughthe quiet room. 

The Captain of the Port smiled a little cynically, scarcelyunderstanding. 

Yet something almost fatherly about his sad and wistful face steeledher to still further persistence, and she afterward remembered, alwaysa little shamefaced, that she had wept and clung to his arm and weptstill again, before she melted and bent him from his officialdetermination. She saw, through blurred and misty eyes, his hand goout and touch an electric button at his side. She saw him write threelines on a sheet of paper, an attendant appear, and heard an orderbriefly and succinctly given. She had gained her end. 

The Captain of the Port rose as she turned to go from the room. 

"Good night, and also good-bye, _signorina_!" he said quietly, with hisstately, old-world bow. 

She paused at the door, wordlessly demeaned, momentarily ashamed ofherself. She felt, in some way, how miserable and low and self-seekingshe stood beneath him, how high and firm he stood above her, with hiscalm and disinterested kindliness. 

She turned back to him once more. 

"Good-bye, " she said inadequately, in her tearful and tremulouscontralto. "Good-bye, and thank you, again and again!"

He bowed from where he stood in the center of his quiet and shelteredoffice, seeming, to her, a strangely old-time and courtly figure, aproud yet unpretentious student of life at peace with his own soul. The years would come and go, the years that would so age and wear andtorture _her_, but he would reign on in that quiet office unchanged, contented, still at peace with himself and all his world. "Good-bye, "she said for the third time, from the doorway. 

Then she hurried down to her waiting carriage and raced for the quay. There she took an almost malicious delight in the bustle andperturbation to which her return gave sudden rise. The sleepy andsullen crew were stirred out, signals were clanged, ropes were castoff; and down in her little narrow cabin, securely shut off from thedriving spray, she could feel and hear the boat lurch and pound throughthe waves. Then came shrill calls of the whistle above, the sound ofgruff voices, the rasp and scrape of heaving woodwork against woodwork, the grind of the ladder against the boat-fenders, the cry of theofficer telling her to hurry. 

She walked up the _Slavonia's_ ladder steadily, demurely, for under thelights of the promenade deck she could see the clustering, inquisitiveheads, where a dozen crowding passengers tried to ascertain just whocould be coming aboard with such ceremony. 

Leaning over the rail, with a cigar in his mouth, she caught sight ofher husband. As she passed him, at the head of the ladder, he spokeone short sentence to her, under his breath. 

It was a commonplace enough little sentence, but as the purport of itfiltered through her tired mind it stung her into both a new warinessof attitude and thought and a new gratefulness of heart. 

For as she passed him, without one betraying emotion or one glanceaside, he had whispered to her, under his breath:

"_Keenan is here, on board. Be careful!_"

CHAPTER XVI

BROKEN INSULATION

The _Slavonia_ was well down the Adriatic before Keenan was seen ondeck. Both Frank and Durkin, by that time, had met in secret more thanonce, and had talked over their predicament and decided on a plan ofaction. 

"Whatever you do, " Durkin warned her, "don't let Keenan suspect who Iam! Don't let him get a glimpse of you with me. My part now has gotto be what you'd call 'armed neutrality. ' If anything unforeseen turnsup--and that can only be at Palermo or Gibraltar--I'll be watching nearby to come to your help in some way--but, whatever you do, don't letKeenan suspect this!"

"You mean that we mustn't even look at each other?" she cried, in mockdismay. 

"Precisely, " he continued. 

"What if an officer should introduce you to me?" She laughed a little. 

The untimeliness of her laughter disturbed him. More and more often, during the last few weeks, he had beheld the signs of some callousingand hardening process going on within her. 

"Oh, in that case, " he answered, "you'll find me very glum anduncongenial. You'll probably be only too glad to leave me alone!"

She nodded her head in meditative assent. Her problem was a difficultone. 

"Jim, " she said suddenly, "why should we play this waiting andretreating game during the next two weeks? Here we have Keenan onboard, with nothing to interfere with our operations. Why can't wework a little harder to win his confidence?"

"We?" asked the other. 

"Well, why couldn't _I_? All along, during those days in Genoa, I hadthe feeling that he would have believed in me, if some little outsideaccident had only confirmed his faith in me. We can't tell, of course, just what he found out after that Pobloff affair, or just how heinterpreted it, or whether he is as much in the dark as ever. If thatis the case, we may stand just where we were before with Keenan!"

"But I thought you wanted to get away from this sort of thing?"

"I do--when the time comes, " she evaded, tortured by the thought thatshe had withheld anything from him. "I do--but are we to let Keenango, when we have him so close to us?"

"Then go ahead and both capture and captivate him!" said Durkin, with avoice that was gruff only because it was indifferent. Still again hewas oppressed by the feeling that she was passing beyond his power. 

"But see, Jim--I'm getting so old and ugly!" And again she laughed, with her own show of indifference, though her husband knew, by thewistfulness of her face, that she was struggling to hold back somedeeper and stronger current of feeling. So he thrust his hands deep inhis pockets, and refused to meet her eyes for a second time. 

"I don't see why we should be afraid of either Palermo or Gibraltar, "Durkin went on at last, with a half-impatient business-is-businessglance about him. "Keenan is alone in this. He has no agents overhere, that we know of, and he daren't put anything in the hands of theauthorities. He's a runaway, a fugitive with the district-attorney'soffice after him, and he has to move just as quietly as we do. Mark mywords, where he will make his first move, and do anything he's going todo, will be in New York!"

"Then why can't I prepare the ground for the New York situation, whatever it may be?" she demanded. 

"You mean by standing pat with Keenan?"

"Precisely. "

"Then how will you begin?"

"By sending him a note at once, telling him how I slipped away fromGenoa to Venice, and asking him the meaning of the Pobloff attack--inother words, by appearing so actively suspicious of _him_ that he'llforget to be suspicious of _me_. "

"And what do you imagine he will answer?"

"I think he will send me back word to say absolutely nothing about theGenoa episode--he may even claim that it's quite beyond hiscomprehension. That will give us a chance to meet more naturally, andthen we can talk things over more minutely, at our leisure. "

Durkin wheeled on her, half-angrily. Through all their career, he hadremained strangely unschooled to any such concession as this. It wasan affront to his dormant and masculine spirit of guardianship; itseemed a blow in the teeth of his nurturing instinct, an overriding ofhis prerogatives of a man and a husband. 

"While you're making love to him on the bridge-deck, on moonlightnights!" he flung back at her, bitterly. 

"Do you think I could?" she murmured, with a ghost of a sigh. 

Durkin emitted a little impatient oath. 

"Don't swear, Jim!" she reproved him. 

The vague prescience that some day he should lose her, that in sometime yet to be she should pass beyond his reach and control, stillagain filtered through his consciousness, like a dark and corrodingseepage. He caught her by the arm roughly, and looked into her face, for one silent and scrutinizing minute. 

"Do you care?" she asked, and it seemed to him there was a tremor ofhappiness in her tone. 

"I _hate_ this part of the business!" he cried, with still another oath. 

"Oh, do you care?" she reiterated, as her arms crept about himvaliantly, yet a little timidly. 

He surrendered, against his will, to the gentle artillery of her tears. They startled and unmanned him for a little, they came so unexpectedly, for as he crushed her in his sudden responding embrace, the impulse, atthat time and in that place, seemed the incongruous outcropping of somedeeply submerged stratum of feeling. 

"If you _do_ care, Jim, why do you never tell me so?" she demanded ofhim, in gentle reproof. He then noticed, for the first time, thehungry and unsatisfied look that brooded over her face. He confessedto himself unhappily that something about him was altered. 

"This cursed business knocks that sort of thing out of you, " heexpiated, discomforted at the thought that a feeling so longdisregarded could grip him so keenly. And all the while he was torn bythe misery of two contending impressions; one, the dim, subliminalforeboding that she was ordained for worthier and cleaner hands thanhis, the other, that this upheaval of the emotions still had the powerto shake and bewilder and leave him so wordlessly unhappy. It was theever-recurring incongruity, the repeated syncretism, which made himvaguely afraid of himself and of the future. Then, as he looked downinto her face once more, and studied the shadowy violet eyes, and thelow brow, and the short-lipped mobile mouth so laden with impulse, andthe soft line of the chin and throat so eloquent of weakness andyielding, a second and stronger wave of feeling surged through him. 

"I love you, Frank; I tell you I do love you!" he cried, with a voicethat did not seem his own. And as she lay back in his arms, weak andsurrendering, with the heavy lashes closed over the shadowy eyes, hestooped and kissed her on her red, melancholy mouth. 

Yet as he did so the act seemed to take on the touch of somethingsolemn and valedictory, though he fought back the impression with hisstill reiterated cry of "I love you!"

"Then why are you unkind to me?" she asked, more calmly now. 

"Oh, can't you see I want you--all of you?" he cried. 

"Then why do you leave me where so much must be given to other things, to hateful things?" she asked, with her mild and melancholy eyes stillon his face. 

"God knows, I've wanted you out of it, often enough!" he avowed, desolately. And she made no effort to alleviate his suffering. 

"Then why not take me out of it, and keep me out of it?" she demanded, with a cold directness that brought him wheeling about on her. 

He suddenly caught her by the shoulders, and held her away from him, atarms' length. She thought, at first, that it was a gesture ofrepudiation; but she soon saw her mistake. "I swear to God, " he wassaying to her, with a grim tremor of determination in his voice as hespoke, "I swear to God, once we are out of this affair, _it will be thelast_!"

"It will be the last!" repeated the woman, broodingly, but her wordswere not so much a declaration as a prayer. 

CHAPTER XVII

THE TANGLED SKEIN

It was the _Slavonia's_ last night at sea. In another twelve hours thepilot would be aboard, Quarantine would be passed, the engines would beslowed down, and the great steamer would be lying at her berth in theNorth River, discharging her little world of life into the scatteredcorners of a waiting continent. Already, on the green baizebulletin-board in the companionway the purser had posted the customarynotice to the effect that the steamer's operator was now in connectionwith New York City, and that wireless messages might be received forall points in Europe and America. 

There was a chill in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting besideKeenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless andphantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, afterthe mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed toher to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she feltto be before her. 

She had not been altogether amiss in her predictions of what the pastfortnight would bring forth. She had erred a little, she felt, in herestimate of Keenan's character; yet she had not been mistaken in thecourse of action which he was to pursue. 

For, from the beginning, after the constraint of their first meeting onboard had passed away, he had shown her a direct and open friendlinesswhich now and then even gave rise to a vague and uneasy suspicion inher own mind. This friendliness had brought with it an easier exchangeof confidences, then a seeming intimacy and good-fellowship which, attimes, made it less difficult for Frank to lose herself in her rôle. 

Keenan, one starlit night under the shadow of a lifeboat amidships, hadeven acknowledged to her the dubiousness of the mission that had takenhim abroad. Later, he had outlined to her what his life had been, telling her of his struggles when a penniless student of the City lawschool, of his early and unsavory criminal-court efforts, and hisunhappy plunge into the morasses of Eighth-ward politics, of hiscampaign against the "Dave Kelly" gang, and the death of his politicalcareer which came with that opposition, of his swinging round to thetides of the times and taking up with bucket-shop work, of his "shark"lawyer practices and his police-court legal trickeries, of his gradualidentification with the poolroom interests and his first gleaning ofgambling-house lore, of his drifting deeper and deeper into this lifeof unearned increment, of his fight with the Bar Association, which wastaken and lost before the Judiciary Committee of Congress, and of hisfinal offer of retainer from Penfield, and private and expert servicesafter the second raid on that gambler's Saratoga house. Frank couldunderstand why he said little of the purpose that took him to Europe. Although she waited anxiously for any word he might let fall on thatsubject, she respected his natural reticence in the matter. He was acriminal, low and debased enough, it was true; but he was a criminal ofsuch apparent largeness of mind and such openness of spirit that hisvery life of crime, to the listening woman, seemed to take on thedignity of a Nietzsche-like abrogation of all civic and social ties. 

Yet, in all his talk, he was open and frank enough in his confession ofattitude. He had seen too much of criminal life to have many illusionsor to make many mistakes about it. He openly admitted that the end ofall careers of crime was disaster--if not open and objective, at leasthidden and subjective. He had no love for it all. But when once, through accident or necessity, in the game, he protested, there was butone line of procedure, and that was to bring to illicit activity thatcontinuous intelligence which marked the conduct of those who stoodready to combat it. Society, he declared, owed its safety to the factthat the criminal class, as a rule, was made up of its leastintelligent members. When criminality went allied with a shrewd mindand a sound judgment--and a smile curled about Keenan's melancholyCeltic mouth as he spoke--it became transplanted, practically, to thesphere and calling of high finance. 

But if the defier of the Establish Rule preferred the simpler order ofthings, he continued, his one hope lay in the power of making use ofhis fellow-criminals, by applying to the unorganized smaller fry of hisprofession some particular far-seeing policy and some deliberatepurpose, and through doing so standing remote and immune, as allcentres of generalship should stand. 

This, he went on to explain, was precisely what Penfield had done, withhis art palaces and his European jaunts and his doling out of politicalpatronage and his prolonged defiance of all the police powers of agreat and active city. He had organized and executed with Napoleoniccomprehensiveness; he had fattened on the daily tribute of lessimaginative subordinates in sin. And now he was fortified behind hisown gold. He was being harassed and hounded for the moment--but theemotional wave of reform that was calling for his downfall would breakand pass, and leave him as secure as ever. 

"Now, my belief is, " Keenan told the listening woman, "that if you findyou cannot possibly be the Napoleon of the campaign, it is well worthwhile to be the Ney. I mean that it has paid me to attach myself to aman who is bigger than I am, instead of going through all the dangersand meannesses and hardships of a petty independent operator. It paysme in two ways. I get the money, and I get the security. "

"Then you believe this man Penfield will never be punished?"

He thought over the question for a moment or two. 

"No, I don't think he ever will. He stands for something that is asactive and enduring in our American life as are the powers arrayedagainst him. You see, the district-attorney's office represents thecentripetal force of society. Penfield stands for the centrifugalforce. They fight and battle against one another, and first one seemsto gain, and then the other, and all the while the fight between thetwo, the struggle between the legal and the illegal, makes up thebalance of everyday life. "

"You mean that we're all gamblers, at heart?"

"I mean that every Broadway must have its Bowery, that the world canonly be so good--if you try to make it better, it breaks out in a newplace--and the master criminal is a man who takes advantage of thisnervous leakage. We call him the Occasional Offender--and he's themost dangerous man in all society. In other words, the passion, as yousay, for gambling, is implanted in all of us; the thought of some vasthazard, of some lucky stroke of fate, is in your head as often as it isin mine. You tell me you are a hard-working art collector, making adecent living by gadding about Europe picking up knick-knacks. Now, suppose I came to you with a proposal like this: Suppose I told youthat without any greater personal discomfort, without any greaterdanger or any harder work, you might, say, join forces with me and atone play of the game haul in fifty thousand dollars from men who nomore deserve this money than we do, I'll warrant that you'd think overit pretty seriously. "

The woman at his side laughed a little, and then gave a significantlycareless shrug of her small shoulders. 

"Who wouldn't?" she said, and their eyes met questioningly, in theuncertain light. 

"Women, as a rule, are timid, " he said at last. "They usually preferthe slower and safer road. "

"Sometimes they get tired of it. Then, too, it isn't always safe justbecause it's slow!"

It seemed to give him the opening for which he had been waiting. Helooked at her with undisguised yet calculating admiration. 

"I'll wager _you_ would never be afraid of a thing, if you once gotinto it, or wanted to get into it!" he cried. 

She laughed again, a self-confident and reassuring little laugh. 

"I've been through too many things, " she admitted simply, "to talkabout being thin-skinned!"

"I knew as much!"

"Why do you say that?"

"I could see it from the first. You've got courage, and you're shrewd, and you know the world--and you've got what's worth all the rest puttogether. I mean that you're a fine-looking woman, and you've neverlet the fact spoil you!"

There was no mistaking the pregnancy of the glance and question whichshe next directed toward him. 

"Then why couldn't you take me in with you?" she asked, with aquiet-toned solemnity. 

She had the sensations of a skater on treacherously thin ice, as shewatched the slow, cautious scrutiny of his unbetraying face. But now, for some reason, she knew neither fear nor hesitation. 

"And what if we did?" he parried temporizingly. 

"Well, what if we did?--men and women have worked together before this!"

Even in the dim light that surrounded them she could notice the colorgo out of his intent and puzzled face. From that moment, in somemysterious way, she lost the last shred of sympathy for his abject andisolated figure, and yet she was the one, she knew, who had been mostunworthy. 

"And do you understand what it would imply--what it would mean?" heasked slowly and with significant emphasis. 

She could not repress her primal woman's instinct of revolt from thethoughts which his quiet interrogation sent at her, like an arrow. Butshe struggled to keep down the little shudder which woke and stirredwithin her. He had done nothing more than respond to her tacitchallenge. But she feared him, more and more. Until then she hadadvanced discreetly and guardedly, and as she had advanced and takenher new position he had as guardedly fallen back and held his own. Ithad been a strange and silent campaign, and all along it had filledFrank with a sense of stalking and counter-stalking. Now they wereplunging into the naked and primordial conflict of man against woman, without reservations and without indirections--and it left her with avague fear of some impending helplessness and isolation. She had asudden prompting to delay or evade that final step, to temporize andwait for some yet undefined reinforcements. 

"And you realize what it means?" he repeated. 

"Yes, " she said in her soft contralto. A feeling of revulsion that wasalmost nausea was consuming her. This, then, she told herself, was thebitter and humiliating price she must pay for her tainted triumph. 

"And would you accept and agree to the conditions--the onlyconditions?" he demanded, in a voice now hatefully tremulous with somerising and controlling emotion. She had the feeling, as she listened, that she was a naked slave girl, being jested over and bidden for onthe auction block of some barbaric king. She felt that it was time toend the mockery; she no longer even pitied him. 

"Listen!" she suddenly cried, "they are beginning to send the wireless!"

They listened side by side, to the brisk kick and spurt and crackle ofthe fluid spark leaping between the two brass knobs in the littleoperating-room just above where they sat. They could hear itdistinctly, above the drone of the wind and the throb of the enginesand the quiet evening noises of the orderly ship--spitting andcluttering out into space. To the impatient man it was nothing morethan the ripple of unintelligent and unrelated sounds. 

To the wide-eyed and listening woman it was a decorous and coherentmarch of dots and dashes, carrying with it thought and meaning andsystem. And as each word fluttered off on its restless Hertzian wings, like a flock of hurrying carrier-pigeons through the night, the womanlistened and translated and read, word by word. 

"Then we go it together--you and I--for all it's worth!" Keenan wassaying, with his face near hers and his hand on her motionless arm. 

"Listen, " she said sharply. "It--it sounds like a bag of lightninggetting loose, doesn't it?"

For the message which was leaping from the lonely and dipping ship tothe receiving wires at the Highland Heights Station was one that sheintended to read, word by word. 

It was a simple enough message, but as it translated itself intointelligible coherence it sent a creeping thrill of conflicting fearand triumph through her. For the words which sped across space fromkey to installation-pole read:

"Woman--named--Allen--will--bring--papers--to--P--Field's--downtown--house--I--will--wait--word--from--you--at--Philadelphia--advise--me--of--situation--there--and--wire--D--in--time--Kerrigan. "

It was only then that she was conscious of the theatricalities fromwhich she had emerged, of the man so close beside her, still waitingfor her play-acting word of decision. It was only then, too, that shefully understood the adroitness, the smooth and supple alertness, ofher ever-wary and watchful companion. 

But she rose to the situation without a visible sign of flinching. Taking one deep breath, as though it were a final and comprehensivegulp of unmenaced life, she turned to him, and gazed quietly andsteadily into his questioning eyes. 

"Yes, if you say it, I'm with you now, whether it's for good or bad!"

"And this is final!" he demanded. "If you begin, you'll stick to it!"

"To the bitter end!" she answered grimly. And there was something sounemotionally decisive in her tone that he no longer hesitated, nolonger doubted her. 

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SEVERED KNOT

It was in the gray of the early morning, as the _Slavonia_ steamed fromthe Upper Bay into the North River and the serrated skyline ofManhattan bit into the thin rind of sunrise to the east, that Durkinand Frank came suddenly together in a deserted companionway. She hadbeen praying for one hour more, and then all would be set right. 

"I want to see you!" he said sharply. 

She looked about to make sure they were unobserved. 

"I know it--but I daren't run the risk--now!"

"Why not now? What has changed?" he demanded. 

"I tell you we can't, Jim! We might be seen here, any minute!"

"What difference should that make?"

"It makes every difference!"

"By heaven, I've _got_ to see you!" For the first time she realizedthe force of the dull rage that burned within him. "I want to knowwhat's before us, and how we're going to act!"

"I tell you, Jim, I can't talk to you here!"

"You mean you don't care to!" he flashed out. 

"Can't you trust me?" she pleaded. 

"Trust you? What has trust to do in a business like ours?"

"It is _your_ business--until you put an end to it!" And her voiceshook with the repressed bitterness of her spirit. "I tried to see youquietly, last night, but you had gone to your cabin. I have a feelingthat we're under the eye of every steward on this ship--I _know_ we arebeing watched, all the time. And if you were seen here with me, itwould only drag you in, and make it harder to straighten out, in theend. Can't you see what's going on?"

"Yes, I _have_ been seeing what's going on--and I'm sick of it!"

"Oh, not _that_, Jim!" she cried, in a little muffled wail. "You knowit would never be that!"

His one dominating feeling was that which grew out of the stingingconsciousness that she wanted to escape him, that the moment had comewhen she could make an effort to evade him. But he was only paying thepenalty! He had sowed, he told himself, and it was only natural thatin time he should reap! Already he was losing her! Already, it mightbe, he had lost her!

"Won't you be reasonable?" she was saying, and her voice sounded faintand far away. "I've got to see this through now, and one little falsemove would spoil everything! I must land by myself. I'll write you, at the Bartholdi, when and where to meet me!"

The noise of approaching footsteps sounded down the carpetedpassageway. He had caught her by the arm, but now he released his gripand turned away. 

"Quick, " she whispered, "here's somebody coming!"

She was struggling with the ends of her veil, and Durkin was aimlesslypacing away from her, when the hurrying steward brushed by them. Amoment later he returned, followed by a second steward, but by thistime Durkin had made his way to the upper deck, and was looking withquiescent rage at the quays and walls and skyscrapers of New York. 

Before the steamer wore into the wharf Frank had seen Keenan and a lastfew words had passed between them. She sternly schooled herself tocalmness, for she felt her great moment had come. 

At his request that her first mission be to deliver a sealed packet atthe office of Richard Penfield, in the lower West Side, she evincedneither surprise nor displeasure. It was all in the day's work, sheprotested, as Keenan talked on, giving her more definite instructionsand still again impressing on her the need for secrecy. 

She took the sealed package without emotion--the little package forwhich she had worked so hard and lost so much and waited so long--andas apathetically secreted it. Equally without emotion she passedDurkin, standing at the foot of the gangway. Something in his face, however, warned her of the grim mood that burned within him. Shepitied him, not for his suffering, but for his blindness. 

"Don't follow me!" she muttered, between her teeth, as she sweptunbetrayingly by him, and hurriedly made her way out past the customsbarrier. It was not until she had reached the closed carriage Keenan'ssteward had already ordered for her that she realized how apparentlycursory and precipitate had been that hurried word of warning. Butthere was time for neither explanation nor display of emotion. Itcould all be made clear and put right, later. 

She heard the nervous trample of hoofs on the wooden flooring, thebattle of truck-wheels, the muffled sound of calling voices, and sheleaned back in the gloomy cab and closed her eyes with a great sense ofescape, with a sense of relief tinged with triumph. 

As she did so the door of her turning cab was opened, and the suddensquare of light was blocked by a massive form. She gave a startledlittle cry as the figure swung itself up into the seat beside her. Then the curtained door swung shut, with a slam. It seemed like thesnap of a steel trap. 

"Hello, there, Frank!--I've been looking out for you!" said theintruder, with a taunt of mockery in his easy laugh. 

_It was MacNutt_. She gaped at him stupidly, with an inarticulatethroaty gasp, half of protest, half of bewilderment. 

"You see, I know you, Frank, and Keenan doesn't!" And again she feltthe sting of his scoffing laughter. 

She looked at the subdolous, pale-green eyes, with their predatoryrestlessness, at the square-blocked, flaccid jaw, and the beefy, animal-like massiveness of the strong neck, at the huge form odorous ofgin and cigar smoke, and the great, hairy hands marked with theirpurplish veinings. It seemed like a ghost out of some long-past andonly half-remembered life. It came back to her with all thehideousness of a momentarily forgotten nightmare, made newly hideous bythe sanities of ordered design and open daylight in which it intruded. And her heart sank and hope burned out of her. 

"You! How dare _you_ come here?" she demanded, with a show of hotdefiance. 

He looked at her collectedly and studiously, with an approving littleside-shake of the bull-dog, pugnacious-looking head. 

"You're the same fine looker!" was all he said, with an appreciativeclucking of the throat. Oh, how she hated him, and everything forwhich he stood!

By this time they had threaded their way out of the tangled traffic ofWest street, and were rumbling cityward through the narrower streets ofGreenwich village. 

Frank's first intelligible feeling was one of gratitude at the thoughtthat Durkin had escaped the trap into which she herself had fallen. That did not leave the situation quite so hopeless. Her second feelingwas one of fear that he might be following her, then one that he mightnot, that he would not be near her in the coming moment of need--forshe knew that now of all times MacNutt held her in the hollow of hishand--that now, as never before, he would frustrate and crush andobliterate her. There were old transgressions to be paid for; therewere old scores to be wiped out. Keenan and his Penfield wealth werenothing to her now--she was no longer plotting for the future, butshrinking away from her dark and toppling present, that seemed about tobuckle like a falling wall and crush her as it fell. Month aftermonth, in Europe, she had known visions of some such meeting as this, through nightmare and troubled sleep. And now it was upon her. 

MacNutt seemed to follow her line of flashing thought, for he emitted ashort bark of a laugh and said: "It's pretty small, this world, isn'tit? I guessed that we'd be meetin' again before I'd swung round thecircle!"

"Where are we going?" she demanded, trying to lash her disordered andstraggling thoughts into coherence. 

"We're goin' to the neatest and completest poolroom in all Manhattan!"

"Poolroom?" she cried. 

"Yes, my dear; I mean that we're drivin' to Penfield's brand-newdowntown house, where, as somewhat of a hiker in the past, you'll seethings done in a mighty whole-souled and princely fashion!"

"But why should I go there? And why with you?"

"Oh, I'm on Penfield's list, just at present, kind o' helpin' to soothesome of the city police out o' their reform tantrums. And you've gotabout a quarter of a million of Penfield's securities on you--so Ithought I'd kind o' keep an eye on you--this time!"

Her first impulse was to throw herself headlong from the cab door. Butthis, she warned herself, would be both useless and dangerous. Throughthe curtained window she could see that they were now in the morepopulous districts of the city, and that the speed at which they werecareering down the empty car-tracks was causing early morningfoot-passengers to stop and turn and gaze after them in wonder. It wasnow, or never, she told herself, with a sudden deeper breath ofdetermination. 

With a quick motion of her hand she flung open the door, and leaningout, called shrilly for the driver to stop. He went on unheeding, asthough he had not heard her cry. 

She felt MacNutt's fierce pull at her leaning shoulder, but shestruggled away from him, and repeated her cry. A street boy or two ranafter the carriage, adding to the din. She was tearing and fighting inMacNutt's futile grasp by this time, calling desperately as she foughthim back. As the cab swerved about an obstructing delivery-wagon apatrolman sprang at the horses' heads, was jerked from his feet, andwas carried along with the careering horse. But in the end he broughtthem to a stop. Before he could reach the cab door a crowd hadcollected. 

A hansom dashed up as the now infuriated officer brushed and elbowedthe crowd aside. Above the surging heads, in that hansom, Frank couldsee the familiar figure, as it leaped to the ground and dove throughthe closing gap of humanity, after the officer. 

It was Durkin; and now, in a sudden passion of blind fear for him shesprang from the cab-step and tried to beat him back with her nakedhands, foolishly, uselessly, for she knew that if once together MacNuttand he would fall on one another and fight it out to the end. 

The patrolman caught her back, roughly, and held her. 

"What's all this, anyway?" 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 voiceMacNutt 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. 

"I will give everything up to him, officer, if he'll only not make ascene!" She was fumbling at a package in the bosom of her dress. 

"He can have his stuff, every bit of it--if he'll let it go at that!"

Durkin caught his cue as he saw the color of one corner of the sealedyellow manila envelope. 

"Stand back there!" howled the officer to the crowding circle. "Andyou, shut up!" he added to MacNutt, now horrible to look upon withsuppressed rage. 

"This woman lifted a package of mine, officer, " said Durkin quickly. "If it's intact, why, let her go!"

His fingers closed, talon-like, on the manila envelope. He flashed theunbroken red seal at the officer, with a little laugh of triumph. Thatlaugh seemed to madden MacNutt, as he made a second ineffectual effortto break into that tense and rapid cross-fire of talk. 

"And you don't want to lay a charge?" the policeman demanded, as heangrily elbowed back the ever intruding circle. 

"Let 'em go!" said Durkin, backing toward his cab. 

"But what's the papers, and what t'ell does _she_ want with 'em?"interrogated the officer. 

"Correspondence!" said Durkin easily, almost lightheartedly. "Kind ofpersonal stuff. They're--_he's_ drunk, anyway!" For stumbling angrilyout of the cab, MacNutt was crying that it was all a pack of lies, thatthey were a quarter of a million in money and that the officer shouldarrest Durkin on the spot, or he'd have him "broke. "

"And then you'll chew me up an' spit me out, won't you, you blue-gilledIrish bull-dog?" jeered the irate officer, already out of temper withthe unruly crowd jostling about him. 

"I say arrest that man!" screamed the claret-faced MacNutt. 

"And I say I'll run _you_ in, and run you in mighty quick, if you don'tget rid o' them jim-jams pretty soon!"

"By God, I'll take it out of _you_ for this, when my turn comes!" ravedMacNutt, turning, purplish gray of face, on the deprecating Durkin. "I'll take it out of you, by God!"

"There--there! He's simply drunk, officer; and the woman has squaredherself. I don't want to press any charge. But you'd better take hisname!"

"Drunk, am I? You'll be drunk when I finish with you. You won't havea name, you'll have a number, when I'm through with you!" repeated theinfuriated MacNutt. 

"Look here, the two o' you!" suddenly exclaimed the outraged arm of thelaw, "you climb into that hack and clear out o' here, as quick as youcan, or I'll run you both in!"

MacNutt still expostulated, still begged for a private audience in thestreet-corner saloon, still threatened and pleaded and protested. 

The exasperated officer turned to the cab-driver, as he slung thestreet loafers from him to right and left. 

"Here, you get these fares o' yours out o' this--get them away mightyquick, or I'll have you soaked for breakin' the speed ord'nance!"

Then he turned quickly, for the frightened woman had emitted a sharpscream, as her bull-necked companion, with the vigor of a new anddesperate resolution, bodily caught her up and thrust her into thegloom of the half-curtained carriage. 

"Oh, Jim, Jim, don't let him take me!" she cried mysteriously to theman she had just robbed. But the man she had just robbed looked at herwith what seemed indifferent eyes, and said nothing. 

"Don't you know where he's taking me? Can't you see? It's toPenfield's!" she cried, through her weakening struggles. 

A new and strange paralysis of all his emotions seemed to have creptover Durkin, as he watched the cab door slammed shut and the horses goplunging and curveting out through the crowd. 

"You'd better get away as quiet as you can!" said the policeman, in anundertone, for Durkin had slipped a ten-dollar bill into hisunprotesting fingers. "You'd better slide, for if the colonel happensalong I can't do much to help you out!"

Then, with his hand on Durkin's cab door he said, with unfeignedbewilderment: "Say, what's the game of your actress friend, anyway?"

Durkin turned away in disgust, without answering. She was no longerhis friend; she was his enemy, his betrayer! He had lived by thesword, and by the sword he should die! He had triumphed through crime, and through crime he was being undone! He had led her into the pathsof duplicity; he had taught her wrong-doing and dishonor; and with thevery tools he had put in her hand she had cut her way out to liberty, and turned and defeated him!

Then he remembered the scene on the _Slavonia_, and her passionate cryfor him, for his love. In the wake of this came the memory of stillearlier scenes and still more passionate cries for what he had soscantily given her. 

Then suddenly he smote his knees with his clenched fists, and saidaloud:

"It can't be true! It can't be true!"

CHAPTER XIX

THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST

Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself outin an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so oftenhad happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for pastmisdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling, and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with thathunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing, almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled, the danger into which he had passively permitted his wife to drift. 

It was not until after two hours of fierce and troubled thought, however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drovedown that man-crowded crevasse where lower Broadway flaunted itsSemitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courtsbuilding in Centre street. 

Once there, he made his way to the office of the district-attorney. Ashe thoughtfully waited for admission into that democratized court oflast appeal there passed through his mind the dangers and the chancesthat lay before him. The situation had its menaces, both obvious andunforeseen, but the more he thought it over the more he realized thatthe emergency called for action, at once decisive and immediate. Hehad already bungled and hesitated and misjudged. Blind feeling hadwarped his judgment. Until then he had blocked out his path of actiononly crudely; there had been little time for the weighing ofconsequences and the anticipation of contingencies. He had actedquickly and blindly. He had both succeeded and been defeated. 

Still again the actual peril hanging over his wife came home to him. In the dust and tumult of battle, and in the black depths of thejealous vapors that had so blinded and sickened him, he had for themoment forgotten just what she meant to him, just how handicapped andhelpless he stood without her. 

If the thought of their separation touched him, because of moreemotional reasons, it was already too early in his mood of reaction toadmit it to his own shamefaced inner self. Yet he felt, now, thatthrough it all she was true gold. It was only when the tie stood moststrained and tortured that the sense of its actual strength came hometo him. 

As these thoughts and feelings swept disjointedly through his busy headword was sent out to him that he might see the district-attorney. 

The office he stepped into was curtain-draped and carpeted, and hungwith framed portraits, and strewn with heavy and comfortable-lookingleather arm-chairs. Durkin had expected it to look like aniron-grilled precinct police-station, and he was a little startled bythe sense of luxury and well-being pervading the place. 

Tilted momentarily back in a leather chair, behind a high-backedhardwood desk, the visitor caught a glimpse of one of those nervouslyalert, youngish-old figures which always seemed to him so typicallyAmerican. 

The man behind the high-backed desk paused in his task of checking alist of typewritten names, and motioned Durkin to a seat. The visitorcould see that he was with an official who would countenance noprofligate waste of time. So he plunged straight into the heart of hissubject. 

"This office is at present carrying on a campaign against RichardPenfield, the poolroom operator and gambler. "

The district-attorney put down his paper. 

"This office is carrying on a campaign against every lawbreaker broughtto its attention, " he corrected, succinctly. Then he caught up anothertype-written sheet. "How much have you lost?" he asked over hisshoulder. 

"I'm not a gambler, " retorted Durkin as crisply. His earlier timidityhad faded away, and more and more he felt the relish of this adventurewith the powers that were opposing him. 

"I suppose not--but how much were your losses?"

"I've lost nothing!" Durkin was growing impatient of this curtlycondescending tone. It was the ponderosity of officialdom, he felt, grown playful, in the face of a passing triviality. 

The district-attorney turned over the card which had been brought in tohim, with a deprecating uplift of the eyebrows. 

"Most of the people who come here to talk about Penfield and hisfriends come to tell me how much they've lost. " He leaned back, andsent a little cloud of cigarette smoke ceilingward. "And, of course, it's part of this office's duty to keep a fool and his moneytogether--as long as possible. What is it I can do for you?"

"I want your help to get a woman out of Penfield's new downtown house!"

"What woman?"

"She is--well, she is a very near friend of mine! She's being held aprisoner there!"

"By the police?"

"No, by certain of Penfield's men. "

"What men?"

"MacNutt, the wire tapper, is one of them!"

"And you would like us to get after MacNutt?"

"Yes, I would!"

"On the charge of wire tapping?"

"That should be one of them!"

"Then I can only refer you to the decision of the Court of Appeals inthe McCord case, and the Appellate Division's reversal of the'green-goods' conviction of 1900! In other words, sir, there is no lawunder which a wire tapper can be prosecuted. "

"But it's not a conviction I want, as much as the woman. I want tosave _her_. "

"Is she a respectable woman?"

Durkin felt that his look was answer enough. 

"Is she a frequenter of poolrooms?"

Durkin hesitated, this time, and weighed his answer. 

"I don't think so. "

"She's not a frequenter?"

"No!"

"Some rather nice women are, you know, at times!"

"She may have been, once, I suppose, but I know not recently. "

"Ah! I see! And what do you want us to do?"

"I want your help to get her out of there, today, before any harm comesto her. "

"What sort of harm?"

Durkin found it hard to put his fears and feelings into satisfactorywords. He was on dangerous seas, but he made his way doggedly on, between the Charybdis of reticence and the Scylla of plain-spokensuggestion. 

"I see--in other words, you want the police to raid Penfield's downtowngambling establishment before two o'clock this afternoon, and releasefrom that establishment a young lady who drove there, and probably notfor the first time, in an open cab in the open daylight, becausecertain ties which you do not care to explain bind you to the younglady in question?"

The brief and brusque finality of tone in the other man warned Durkinthat he had made no headway, and he caught up the other's half-mockingand tacit challenge. 

"For which, I think, this office will be adequately repaid, by beingbrought into touch with information which will help out its previousaction against Penfield!"

"Who will give us this?"

Durkin looked at his cross-examiner, nettled and impatient. 

"I could!"

"But will you?"

"Yes, on the condition I have implied!"

"In other words, you stand ready to bribe us into a doubtful andhazardous movement against the strongest gambler in all New York, onthe expectation of an adequate bribe! This office, sir, accepts nobribes!"

"I would not call it bribery!"

"Then how would you describe it?"

"Oh, I might be tempted to call it--well, coöperation!"

Some tinge of scorn in his words nettled the officer of the law. 

"It all amounts to the same thing, I presume. Now, let me tell yousomething. Even though you came to me today with a drayful of crookedfaro layouts and doctored-up roulette wheels from Penfield's house, itwould be practically impossible, at this peculiar juncture of municipaladministration, to take in my men and carry out a raid over CaptainKuttrell's head!"

"Ah, I see! You regard Penfield as immune!"

"Penfield is _not_ immune!" said the public prosecutor. Theoldish-young face was very flushed and angry by this time. "Don'tmisunderstand me. As a recognized and respected citizen, you alwayshave the right to call on the officers of the law, to secure protectionand punishment of crime. But this must be sought through the naturaland legitimate channels. "

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean go to the police. "

"But to lay a charge with the police would be impracticable, in thiscase. "

"Why would it?"

"Simply because it wouldn't get at Penfield, and it would only leadto--to embarrassing publicity!"

"Exactly so! And you may be sure, young man, that Penfield is quiteaware of that fact. To be candid, it is just such things as this thatallow him to be operating today. If you start the wheels, you muststand the racket!"

"Then you allow a notorious gambler to break every law of the land andsay you can give me no help whatever in balking what amounts to acriminal abduction?"

The swivel-chair creaked peremptorily, as the public prosecutor turnedsharply back to his desk. 

"You'd better try the police!" he bit out impatiently. 

Durkin strode to the door. He was halfway through it, when he wascalled sharply back. 

"Don't carry away the impression, young man, that we're not fightingthis man Penfield as hard as we can!"

"It looks like it!" mocked the man in the doorway. 

"One moment--we have been after this man Penfield, and his kind, andwe're still after them. But we don't pretend to accomplish miracles. This city is made up of mere human beings, and human beings still havethe failing of breaking out, morally, now in one place, now in another. We can compress and segregate those infectious blots, but until you canshow us the open sore we can't put on the salve. If you are convincedyou are the object of some criminal activity, and are willing to holdnothing back, I can detail two plain-clothes men from my own office togo with you and help you out. "

Durkin laughed, a little recklessly, a little scoffingly. Twoplain-clothes men to capture a steel-bound fortress!

"Don't trouble them. They might make Penfield mad--they might getthemselves talked about--and there's no use, you know, making a mess ofone's mayoralty chances!"

And he was through the door indignantly, and as indignantly out, beforethe district-attorney could so much as flick the ash off hiscigarette-end. 

But after doing so, he touched an electric button, and it was at onceanswered by an athletic-looking clerk with all the earmarks of thecollegian about him. 

"Tell Barney to follow that man who just went out. Tell him to keephim under his eye, closely, and report to me tonight! Hurry thesepapers back to the Fire Commissioner. Then get that window up, and letthe Mott Street Merchants' Protective Association in!"

Durkin, in the meantime, hurried uptown in his hansom, consumed with afeeling of resentment, torn by a fury of blind revolt against allorganized society, against all law and authority and order. Still oncemore it seemed that some dark coalition of forces silently confrontedand combated him at every turn. The consciousness that he must nowfight, not only alone, but in the face of this unjust coalition broughtwith it a desperate and almost intoxicating sense of audacity. If thelaw itself was against him, he would take fate into his own hands, andgo to his own ends, in his own way. If the machinery of justice groundso loosely and so blindly, there remained no reason why he himself, however recklessly he went his way, should not in the end disregard itsengines and evade its ever-impending cogs. 

He would show them! He would teach them that red-tape and officialismcould only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive andlightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down anddelegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order, he would show them what he, alone, could do in his own behalf. 

And as he drove hurriedly through the crowded city streets, stilllashing himself into a fury of resentment against organized society; heformulated his plan of action, and mentally took up, point by point, each new move and what it might mean. As he pictured, in his mind, each anticipated phase of the struggle he felt come over him, for thesecond time, a sort of blind and irrational fury, the fury of a rat ina corner, fighting for its life and the life of its mate. 

CHAPTER XX

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

"And here's where we two hang out!" It was MacNutt who spoke. 

Frances Durkin was neither protesting nor struggling when he drew up infront of what she knew to be Penfield's lower gambling club. It stoodin that half-squalidly residential and half-heartedly commercialdistrict, lying south of Washington Square, a little to the west ofBroadway's great artery of traffic. A decorous and unbetraying door, bearing only the modest sign, "The Neptune Club, " and a narrow stairwayleading to an equally decorous and uncompromising hall, gave no hint, to the uninitiated, of what the great gloomy walls of the buildingmight hold. 

But on one side of the narrow door she could make out an incongruouslyornate and showy cigarstore; on the other, an equally unlooked-forwoman's hair-dressing and manicuring parlor. 

In the one, indeed, you might sedately purchase a perfecto, and takeyour peaceful departure, never dreaming of how closely you had skirtedthe walls of the busiest poolroom south of all Twenty-third street. Inthe other you might have your hair quietly shampooed and Marcelled anddressed, and return to your waiting automobile, utterly oblivious ofthe fact that within thirty feet of you fortunes were being stillstaked and lost and won and again swept away at one turn of a wheel, orone stroke of a chalk on a red-lined blackboard. 

It was through the hair-dressing parlor that MacNutt led the dazed andunprotesting Frank, pinning her to his side by the great arm that was, seemingly, so carelessly linked through hers. He gave a curt nod tothe capped and aproned attendant, who touched a button on her desk, without so much as a word of challenge or inquiry. The machine-likeprecision with which each advance was watched and guarded, disheartenedthe imprisoned woman. 

"I'm boss here for a while, and I'm goin' to clean out the building, sothat you can have this little picnic all to your lonely!" remarkedMacNutt, as he pushed her on. 

A door to the rear of the second parlor swung open, and as she was ledthrough it she noticed that it was sheathed with heavy steel plating. Still another door, which opened as promptly to MacNutt's signal, wasarmored with steel, and it was not until this door had closed behindthem that her guardian released the cruel grip on her arm. Then hechuckled a little, gutturally, deep in his pendent and flaccid throat. 

"We're up to date, you see, doin' business in a regular armor-cladoffice!"

Frank looked about her, with widening eyes. MacNutt laughed again, atthe sense of surprise which he read on her face. 

It was obviously a poolroom, but it was unlike anything she had everbefore seen. It was heavily carpeted, and, for a place of itscharacter, richly furnished. The walls were windowless, the lightbeing shed down from twelve heavily ornamented electroliers, eachcontaining a cluster of thirty lamps. These walls, which wereupholstered with green burlap, bordered at the bottom with a richfrieze of lacquered and embossed _papier-mâché_, were divided intopanels, and dotted here and there with little canvases and etchings. On the east end of the room hung one especially large canvas, crownedwith a green-shaded row of electric lamps. 

MacNutt, with a chuckle of pride, touched a button near the door, andthe huge canvas and Bouguereau-looking group of bathing women paintedupon it disappeared from view, disclosing to Frank's startled eyes abulletin blackboard, such as is used in almost every poolroom, for thechalking up of entries and the announcement of jockeys and weights andodds. 

MacNutt pressed a second button, and the twelve electric fans ofburnished brass hummed and sang and droned, and filled the room with astir of air. 

"A little diff'rent, my dear, from the way they did business when youand me were pikers, up in the West Forties, eh?"

Frank remained silent, as the bathing women, with a methodic click ofthe mechanism, once more dropped down through the slit in the pictureframe, and hid the red-lined bulletin board from view. 

"Gamblers, like us, always were weak on art, " gibed MacNutt. "There'sDick Penfield, spendin' a hundred thousand a year on pictures an' vasesan' rugs, and Sam Brucklin makin' his Saratoga joint more like a secondSalon than a first-class bucket-shop, and Larry Wintefield, who knowsmore about a genuine Daghestan than you or me knows about a Morsesounder, and Al MacAdam, who can't buy chinaware fast enough! As forme, I must say I have a weakness for a first-class nood!" The womanbeside him shuddered. "That's all right--but I guess a heap o' thesepainters would be quittin' the profession if it wasn't for folks of ourcallin'!"

Frank's roving but unresponding eyes were taking in the huge mahoganytable, in the centre of the room, the empty, high-backed chairsclustered around it, the countless small round tables, covered withgreen cloth, which flanked the walls, and the familiar Penfield symbol, of three interlaced crescents, which she saw stamped or embossed oneverything. 

He went to one of the five cherry-wood desks which were strewn aboutthe room, and still again touched a button. 

"Blondie, " he said to the capped and aproned attendant who answered thecall from the hair-dressing parlors, "I want you to meet this ladyfriend of mine! Miss Frances Candler, this is Miss Blondie Bonnell, late of Wintefield's Saratoga Sanitarium for sick purses, and stilllater of MacAdam's Mott Street branch! Now, Blondie, like a good girl, run along and get the lady something to drink!"

This proffered refreshment the outraged lady in question silentlyrefused, staring tight-lipped at the walls about her. But MacNutt, onthis score, made ample amends, for having gulped down one ominouslygenerous glass of the fiery liquid, he poured another, and stillanother, into the cavern of his pendulous throat, with repeatedgrateful smacks of the thick and purplish lips. 

"Now, I'm goin' to show you round a bit, just to make it plain to you, before business begins for the day. I want you to see that you're notshut up in any quarter-inch cedar bandbox!"

He took her familiarly by the arm and led her to a door which, like theothers, was covered with a plating of steel, and heavily locked andbarred. 

"Necessity, you see, is still the mother of invention, " he said, as hisfinger played on the electric signal and released the obstructing door. "If we're goin' to do poolroom work, nowadays, we've got to do it bigand comprehensive, same as Morgan or Rockefeller would do their line o'business. You've got to lay out the stage, nowadays, to carry on theshow, or something'll swallow you up. Why, when we worked our lastwire-tapping scheme with a hobo from St. Louis, who was rotten withmoney, we escorted him, on two hours' notice, into as neat a lookin'Postal-Union branch office as you'd care to see, with half a dozen fakekeys a-goin' and twenty actors and supers helpin' to carry off the act. _That's_ the up-to-date way o' doin' it! That's how a man likePenfield makes this kind o' graftin' respectable and aboveboard andjust about as honest as bein' down in the Cotton Exchange!"

He was leading her down a narrow hallway, four feet wide, with unbrokenwalls on either side of them. At the end of this still another armoreddoor led into a medium-sized room, as bald and uninviting as adentist's waiting-room. Here he led her to two horizontal slits in thewall and told her to look down. 

She did so, and found herself peering below, out into the well-stockedcigar-store, with a clear view of the entrance. 

"That's the conning-tower of this here little floating fortress, "chuckled MacNutt, at her shoulder. "This place you're in issteel-lined, and it would take three hours o' chisel and sledge workfor anybody, from Eggers up to Braugham himself, to get inside, eventhough he did find us out, and even though he did escape the sulphuricbottles between the bricks. Each one o' these little slits is in linewith a nice gilded cigar sign on the shop side of the wall. So no onedown there, you see, knows who's eyin' them. _We_ don't need anylookout, hangin' round the street-front and tippin' us off. Our mandown below sizes up everyone who comes into that shop. If he's allright, the button's touched, and the white light flashes, and he getsthrough. If he's not, the cigar clerk rings another button, just underhis counter, and we know what to do. If it's a case o' raid, ourlookout flashes the red light through each o' the four rooms, with onepush of the button, and then our second man throws back the switch andputs out every light in the buildin'. Then with another button push, the locks of every door are thrown shut, and they're four inches thick, most of them, and of good oak and steel. If the electricity shouldgive out, here, you see, are the hand bolts, which can be run out atany time. Then we've got a little mercerized steel office, which youwon't see, where our cashier and our sheet-writers work!"

Frank said nothing, but her still roving eyes took in each detail, bitby bit, as she warned and schooled herself to note and remember eachdoor and room and passage. 

"And now, in case you may be lookin' for it without my help, I'm goin'to take you down and show you the way out. We go through this littlepassage, and then we take up this steel trapdoor. It's heavy, you see!Then we go down this nice little grill-work iron ladder--don't pullback, I've got you!--and then we open this next very fine steeldoor--so; and here we are in what you'd call the safety-deposit vaults. It's a mighty handsome-lookin' safe, all laid in Portland cement, asyou can see, but we're not goin' to tarry lookin' into that just now. "

He was already feeling his way ahead of her, and she was stilldesperately struggling to impress each detail on her distracted mind. 

"You see, if we want to get out, we go through this hall, and followthis little passageway, one end openin' up right under the sidewalk, inthe refractin' glass manhole. Leading to the back, here, is a secondpassage, all barred, the same as the others. So, if our front is shutoff, and they're hot on our trail, we shut everything after us as wego, and then open this neat little steel trapdoor, and find ourselvessmellin' fresh air and five lines full of washin' from that Dagotenement just above us!"

"And why are you showing me all this?" demanded Frank. 

He looked at her out of his pale-green furtive eyes, and locked thedoor with a vindictive snap of the bolts. 

"I'll tell you why, my gay young welcher, for we may as well understandone another, from the start. Now that Penfield's shut up his Newportplace and is coolin' his heels up in Montreal for a few months, I'mrunnin' this nickel-plated ranch myself. And I've got a few old scoresto wipe out--some old scores between that enterprisin' husband o' yoursan' myself!"

"What has he ever done to you? Why, should you want to punish _him_?"argued Frank, helplessly. 

"I'm not goin' to punish him!" declared MacNutt, with a little laugh. "That's just where the damned fine poetic justice of the thing comesin. _He's goin' to punish himself_!"

CHAPTER XXI

THE PIT OF DESPAIR

Frances Durkin looked at the jeering man before her, studiously, belligerently. 

"What do you mean by saying he'll punish himself?" she demanded. 

She seemed like a woman who had just awakened. Her earlier comatoseexpression had altogether passed away. There was life, now, in everyline of her body. 

"I mean that Durkin's got his quarter of a million in securities, allright, all right, but, by God, I've got _you_! And I mean that he'sgoin' to, that he's _got_ to, make a choice between them and you. Sowe'll just wait and find out which he loves best, his beau or hisdough!" And he laughed harshly at the feeble witticism, as he added, in his guttural undertone: "And I guess we get the worth of our money, whichever way it goes!"

Frank's impression was that he was half drunk, that he was mumblingvaguely of revenges which grew up and died in their utterance. Herlook of open scorn stung him into a sudden tremor of anger. 

"Oh, don't think I'm spoutin' wind! If Durkin's the man you think heis, and I hope he is, _he'll be tryin' to nose his way into this placebefore midnight tonight_!"

"And he will, " cried Frank, exultantly, "and with the whole precinctpolice force behind him!"

"He daren't!" retorted MacNutt. "He daren't get within a hundred yardsof the Central Office, and he daren't show his nose inside a precinctstation-house! And that's not all, either. There's no captain on thisside of New York who's goin' to buck against the whole Tammany machinean' poke into this Penfield business. If that young man with thebutterfly necktie over on Centre street thinks he can keep us movin', he's got to do a heap less talkin' and a heap more convictin' before hecan put _our_ lights out! That air is good enough for politics--butit's never goin' to break this here Penfield combination! Oh, no, Jimmie Durkin knows how the land lays. He's one o' your bold andbrainy kind, who likes to shut himself up in a garret for a week, andmake maps of what he's goin' to do, an' how he's goin' to do it, andthen trip off by his lonely and do his huntin' in the dark! And he'sgoin' to try to get in here, before midnight, tonight, and what's more, _he's goin' to find it uncommonly easy to do_!"

"You mean you'll entice him and trap him here?"

"No, I won't lay a finger on him. You'll do the enticin', and he'll dothe trappin'! I won't even be round to see--till afterward!"

"What do you mean by that?"

"I mean we're holdin' open house tonight, " mocked MacNutt, "and thatDurkin will maybe drop in!"

"And then what will it be?"

"Come this way, my beauty, and I'll show you. First thing, though, just notice this fact. We're not goin' to make it too hard anddiscouragin' for Durkin. This trap-door will be left unlocked. Also, that front manhole will be left kind of temptingly open, with a fewchunks o' loose coal lyin' round it, so that even a Mercer streetroundsman couldn't help fallin' into it! Oh, yes, he'll find it easyenough!"

Frank followed him without a word, as he made his way through the lowand narrow steel-lined tunnel leading to the vault-room. 

"Now, my dear, I guess this is the only way he'll be able to get atyou, unless he comes in a flyin' machine, and the first place he'llnose through will be this room. So, bein' old at the business, he'ssure to try a crack at our safe. At least, he'll go gropin' around fora while. Not an invitin'-lookin' piece o' furniture, I grant you, butthat's neither here nor there. It's not the safe that'll be detainin'Durkin, or any other housebreaker who tries to get gay on thesepremises. If you look hard, maybe you'll be able to see what's adamned sight more interestin'!"

Frank looked, but she saw nothing beyond the great vault and theburnished copper guard-rail that surrounded it, like the fender about amarine engine. 

"You don't notice anything strikin'?" he interrogated wickedly. 

She did not. 

He emitted a guttural little growl of a laugh, and stepped over to ahalf-hidden switchboard, high up on the wall. He threw the lever outand down, and the kiss of the meeting metals sounded in a short andmalevolent spit of greenish light. 

"Are you on?" taunted MacNutt. 

Frank's slowly comprehending eyes were riveted on the burnished copperrailing, on which, only a moment before, her careless fingers hadrested. There was no sign, no alteration in the shining surface ofthat polished metal. But she knew that a change, terrible andmalignant, had taken place. It was no longer a mild and innocentguard-rail. It was now an instrument of destruction, an unbuoyedchannel of death. She stood staring at it, with fixed and horrifiedeyes, until it wavered before her, a glimmering and meandering rivuletof refracted light. 

"Are you on?" reiterated the watching man. 

The wave of pallor that swept over her face seemed to change her eyesfrom violet to black, although, for a moment, their gaze remained asveiled and abstracted as a sleep-walker's. Then a movement from hercompanion lashed and restored her to lucidity of thought. For, fromwhere it leaned against the wall, MacNutt had caught up a heavydoor-sheathing of pressed steel. It was painted a Burgundy red, tomatch the upholstery of the upper room where it had once done service, and on the higher of the two panels was embossed the Penfield triplecrescent. 

This great sheet of painted steel MacNutt held above his head, as ahesitating waiter might hold a gigantic tray. Then he stepped towardthe shimmering guard-rail, and stood in front of it. 

"Now, this luxurious-lookin' rear-admiral's rail-fence is at presentconnected with a tapped power circuit, or a light circuit, I don't knowwhich. All I know is that it's carryin' about a twenty-eight-hundredalternatin' current. And just to show that it's good and ready to eatup anything that tries monkeyin' round it, watch this!"

He raised the Burgundy-red door-sheathing vertically above his head, and stepping quickly back, let it descend, so that as it fell it wouldstrike the metal of the sunken vault-top and the copper guardrail aswell. 

The very sound of that blow, as it descended, was swallowed up in thesudden, blinding, lightning-like flash, in the hiss and roar of thepale-green flame, as the sheet of steel, tortured into suddenincandescence, bridged and writhed and twisted, warping and collapsinglike a leaf of writing-paper on the coals of an open fire. A sickeningsmell of burning paint, mingling with the subtler gaseous odors of thecorroding metal, filled the little dungeon. 

"Don't! That's enough!" gasped the woman, groping back toward thesupport of the wall. 

MacNutt shut off the current, and kicked the charred door-sheathing, already fading from incandescence into ashen ruin, with his foot. Thesmell of burning leather filled the room, and he laughed a little, turning on the woman a face crowned with a look of Belial-like triumph, with dark and sunken circles about the vindictive, deep-set eyes. 

Once, in an evening paper, she had pored over the picture of anelectrocution at Sing Sing, a haunting and horrible scene, with thedangling wires reaching down to the prisoner, strapped and bound in hischair, the applied sponges at the base of the spine, the buckled thongsabout the helpless ankles, the grim and waiting gaol officials, theboyish-looking reporters, with watches in their hands, the bald andugly chamber, and in the background the dim figure of RetributiveJustice, with uplifted arm, where an implacable finger was about totouch the fatal button. Time and time again that vision had broughtterror to her midnight dreams, and had left her weak and panting, catching at her startled husband with feverish and passionate hands andholding him and drawing him close to her, as though that momentaryguardianship could protect him from some far and undefined danger. 

"Oh, Mack, " she burst out hysterically, over-wrought by the scenebefore her, "for the love of God, don't make him die this way! Givehim a fighting chance! Give him a show! Do what you like with _me_, but don't blot him out, like a dog, without a word of warning!"

"It's not my doin'!" broke in her tormentor. 

"It's inhuman--it's fiendish!" she went on. "I can't stand the thoughtof it!"

MacNutt laughed his mirthless laugh once more. 

"Oh, I guess you'll stand it!"

"But I can't!" she moaned. 

"Oh, yes; you'll stand it, and you'll see it, too! You'll be righthere, where you can take the whole show in, this time! It won't be acase o' foolin' the old man, like it was last time!"

"I will be here?" she gasped. 

"You'll be right on the spot--and you'll see the whole performance!"

She drew her hands down, shudderingly, over her averted face, as thoughto shut something even from her imagination. 

"And do you know what'll be the end of it all?" MacNutt went on, in hisfrenzied mockery. "It'll all end in a little paragraph or two in the_Morning Journal_, to the effect that some unknown safecracksman orother accidentally came in contact with a live wire, and was shocked todeath in the very act of breaking into a pious and unoffendin'cigar-store vault! And you'll be the only one who'll know anythingdifferent, and I guess you won't do much squealin' about it!"

She wheeled, as though about to spring on him. 

"I will! I will, although I wither between gaol walls for it--althoughI die for it! I'm no weak and foolish woman! I've known life bald tothe bone; I've fought and schemed and plotted and twisted all my daysalmost, and I can die doing it! And if you kill this man, if youmurder him--for it is murder!--if you bring this dog's death on him, Iwill make you pay for it, in one way or another--I'll make you mournit, David MacNutt, as you've made me mourn the first day I ever sawyour face!"

She was in a blind and unreasoning passion of vituperative malevolenceby this time, her face drawn and withered with fear, her eyes luminous, in the dungeon-like half-lights, with the inner fire of her hate. 

"Keep cool, my dear, keep cool!" mocked MacNutt, without a trace oftrepidation at all her vague threats. "Durkin's not dead yet!"

She caught madly at the slender thread of hope which swung from hismockery. 

"No! No, he's _not_ dead yet, and he'll die hard! He's nofool--you've found that out in the past! He will give you a fightbefore he goes, in some way, for he's fought you and beaten you fromthe first--and he'll beat you again--I know he'll beat you again!"

Her voice broke and merged into a paroxysm of sobbing, and MacNuttlooked at her bent and shaken figure with meditative coldness. 

"He may have beaten me, once, long ago--but he'll never do it again. He won't even go out fightin'! He'll go with his head hangin' and hisnose down, like a sneak! And you'll see him go, for you'll be tiedthere, with a gag in your pretty red mouth, and you'll neither move norspeak. And there'll be no light, unless he gets so reckless as tostrike a match. But when the light does come, my dear, it'll be aflash o' blue flame, with a smell o' something burnin'!"

The woman covered her face with her hands, and swayed back and forthwhere she stood. 

Then MacNutt held back his guttural laugh, suddenly, for she had fallenforward on her face, in a dead faint. 

CHAPTER XXII

THE ENTERING WEDGE

It was at least four o'clock in the afternoon--as the janitor of thebuilding later reported to the police--when a Postal-Union lineman, carrying a well-worn case of tools, made his way up through the hallsand stairways of one of those many Italian apartment houses just southof Washington Square and west of Broadway. 

This lineman worked on the roof, apparently, for some twenty minutes. Then he came down again, chatted for a while with the janitor in thebasement, and giving him a cigar, borrowed an eight-foot step-ladder, for the purpose of scaling some twelve feet of brick wall, where theadjoining office building towered its additional story above theapartment-house roof. 

If the janitor had been less averse to mounting his five flights ofstairway, or less indifferent as to the nature of the work which tookthe busy telegraph official up to his roof, he might, that afternoon, have witnessed both a delicate and an interesting electrical operation. 

For once up on the second roof, and sure that he was under no immediateobservation, the lineman in question carefully unpacked his bag oftools. His first efforts were directed toward the steel transom whichcovered the trapdoor opening out on the roof. This, he discovered witha grunt of disappointment, resisted even his short, curved steel lever, pointed at one end, like a gigantic tack-drawer. Restoring this leverto the bottom of his leather tool-bag, he made his way to the southeastcorner of the building, where a tangle of insulated wires, issuing fromthe roof beneath his feet, merged into one compact cable, which, inturn, entered and was protected by a heavy lead pipe, leading, obviously, to the street below, and thence to the cable galleries ofBroadway itself. 

It took him but a minute or two to cut away a section of thisprotecting pipe. In doing so, he exposed to view the many wires makingup an astonishingly substantial cable, for so meager an officebuilding. He then turned back to his tool-case and lifted therefrom, first a Bunnell sounder, and then a Wheatstone bridge, of thepost-office pattern, a coil of KK wire, a pair of lineman's pliers, anda handful or two of other tools. Still remaining in the bottom of hisbag might have been found two small rubber bags filled withnitroglycerine, a cake of yellow soap, a brace and bit, a half-dozendiamond-pointed drills, a box of timers, and a coil fuse, threetempered-steel chisels, a tiny sperm-oil lantern and the steel "jimmy"which had already been tested against the obdurate transom. 

Then, skilfully relaxing the metallic cable strands, he as carefullygraduated his current and attached his sounder, first to one wire andthen to another. Each time that the little Bunnell sounder wasgalvanized into articulate life he bent his ear and listened to thebusy cluttering of the dots and dashes, as the reports of races, as theweights and names of jockeys, and lists of entries and statements ofodds and conditions went speeding into the busy keys of the bigpoolroom below, where men and women waited with white and strainingfaces, and sorrowed and rejoiced as the ever-fluctuant goddess ofchance brought them ill luck or success. 

But Durkin paid little attention to these flying messages wingingcityward from race-tracks so many miles away. What he was in search ofwas the private wire leading from Penfield's own office, whereoninstructions and information were secretly hurried about the city tohis dozen and one fellow-operators. It was from this wire that Durkinhoped, without "bleeding" the circuit, to catch some thread of factwhich might make the task before him more lucid and direct. 

He worked for an hour, connecting and disconnecting, testing andlistening and testing still again, before the right wire fell under histhumb. Then he listened intently, with a little start, for he knew hewas reading an operator whose bluff, heavy, staccato "send" was asfamiliar to his long-practiced ear as a well-known face would be to hiswatching eyes. 

It was MacNutt himself who was "sending. " His first interceptedmessage was an order, to some confederate unknown, to have a carriagecall for him at eight. That, Durkin told himself, was worth knowing. His second despatch was a warning to a certain "Al" Mackenzie not tofail to meet Penfield in Albany, Sunday, at midnight. The thirdmessage was brief, and seemed to be an answer to a question which hadescaped the interloper. 

"Yes, got her here, and here she stays. Things will happen tonight. "

"Ah!" ejaculated Durkin, as he wiped his moist forehead, while therunning dots and dashes resolved themselves into the two intelligiblesentences. 

Then he looked about him, at the leaden sky, at the roofs and walls andwindows of the crowded and careless city, as a _sabreur_ about to enterthe arena might look about him on life for perhaps the last time. 

"Yes, " he said, with a meditative stare at the transom before him, "things _will_ happen tonight. "

CHAPTER XXIII

THE WAKING CIRCUIT

It was a thick and heavy night, with a drizzle of fine rain blanketingthe city. Every now and then a lonely carriage spluttered along theoily and pool-strewn pavement of the cross-street. Every now and then, too, the rush and clang of the Broadway cars echoed down the canyon ofrain-swept silence. 

Durkin waited until the lights of the cigar-store went out. Then heonce more circled the block, keeping to the shadows. As he passed thedarkened cigar-store for the second time his foot, as though byaccident, came sharply in contact with the refracting-prismed manholecover which had sounded so hopefully hollow to his previous tread. Ashe had half-suspected, it was loose. 

He stooped quickly, to turn up his trousers. As he did so threeexploring fingers worked their way under the ledge of the unsecuredcircle of iron and glass. 

It came away without resistance. He looked about him cautiously, without straightening up; then by its shoulder-strap he carefullylowered his leather tool-bag into the passage below, and as guardedlylet himself down after it. 

He waited and listened for a minute or two, before replacing the coverabove him. From the river, in the distance, he could hear the boomingand tooting of the steam craft through the fog. A hurrying car rumbledand echoed past on the Broadway tracks. Two drunken wanderers wentsinging westward in the drizzling rain. Then everything was silenceagain. 

Durkin replaced the covering, noiselessly, and feeling to right andleft with his outstretched hands, crept inward through the narrowtunnel in which he found himself. His fingers came in touch with thechilly surface of a steel-faced door. It sounded heavy and unyieldingto his tentative tap, and his left hand was already reaching back forthe tool-bag which hung by its strap over his shoulder when hisquestioning right hand, pushing forward, discovered that the door wasunlocked, and swung easily outward without resistance. 

He felt and fondled the heavy bolts, thoughtfully, puzzled why itshould be so, until he remembered seeing the half-dozen pieces ofanthracite lying about the manhole on the sidewalk above. That, hetold himself, possibly explained it. Some careless wagon-driver, delivering his load, had left the place unlocked. 

But before he crept into the wider and higher passage before him hepaused to take out the revolver which he carried in his hip pocket, tounlimber it, and carefully feel over the chambered cylinder, to makesure every cartridge-head stood there, in place. This done, hereplaced it, not at his hip, but loose and free, in the righthandpocket of his coat. Then he once more began feeling his way along thesmooth cement floor. He was enveloped in a darkness as absolute asthough he had been shrouded in black velvet--even the glimmer of therefracted street lamps did not penetrate further than the doorway ofthe first tunnel. There was a smell of dampness in the air, as ofmouldy plaster. It was the smell of underground places. Durkin hatedit. 

He had to feel his way about the entire circle of that second narrowchamber before he came to where the inner doorway stood. It, too, wasunlocked, and for the first time some sense of betrayal, someintimidation of being trapped, some latent suspicion of artfullyconcealed duplicity, flashed through his questioning mind. 

He listened, and was greeted by nothing but silence. 

Then he swung the door softly and slowly open. As he did so he leapedback, and to one side, with his right hand in his coat pocket. Forthere suddenly smote on his ears the sharp clang and tinkle of metal. 

He stood there, crouched, for a waiting minute, and then he laughedaloud, for he knew it was only the sound of some piece of falling iron, striking on the cement. To make sure of it, he groped about the floor, and stumbled on the little bar of steel that had fallen. Yet why ithad been there, leaning against the door, he could not comprehend. Wasit there by accident? Or had it been meant as a signal? It showed himone thing, however; its echoing fall had demonstrated to him that theroom he had entered was both higher and larger than the one he hadleft. It might be nothing more than a furnace-room, yet he toldhimself that he must be on his guard, that from now on his perils began. 

Then he wondered why he should feel this premonitory sense, and in whatlay the dividing line, and where lay the difference. 

Yet as he stood there, with his back against the wall, he feltsomething dormant and deep-seated stirring within him. It was not asense of danger; it arose from no outward and tangible manifestations. But somewhere, and persistently, at the root of his being, he heardthat subliminal and submerged voice which could be neither silenced norunderstood. 

He took three groping paces forward, as if to put distance betweenhimself and this foundationless emotion which some part of him seemedstruggling to defy. But for the second time he stood stockstill, weighed down by the feeling of some presence, oppressed by the sense ofsomething vaguely hanging over him. He felt, as Frank had once said, how like a half-articulate key, at the end of an impoverished circuit, consciousness really was; how the spirit so often, in this onlyhalf-intelligible life of theirs, flutters feebly with hints andsuggestions to which it could never give open and unequivocalutterance. Even language, and language the most artful and finished, was, after all, merely a sort of clumsy Morse--its unwieldy dots anddashes left many a mood of the soul unknown and inarticulate. 

As he stood there, in doubt, questioning himself and that vague butdisturbing something which stood before him, he decided to put asummary end to the matter. Fumbling in his pocket, and disregardingany risk which the movement might entail, he caught up a match andstruck it. 

As he shaded the flame and threw it before him, his straining eyescaught only the glimmer of burnished metal--a guard-rail of somedescription--and the dark and ponderous mass of what seemed a depositvault. 

The match burned down, and dropped from his upthrust fingers. Hedecided to grope to the rail, and feel along the metal until he reachedsome point of greater safety. He extended his fingers before him, as ablind man might, and took one shuffling step forward. 

Then a thought came to him, with the suddenness and the shock of anelectric current, as a radiating tingle of nerves, followed by astrangely sickening sense of hollowness about the chest, swept throughhis body. _Could it be Frank herself in danger, and wanting him_?

More than once, in the past, he had felt that mysterious medium, morefluid and unfathomable than electricity itself, carry its vague butvital message in to him. He had felt that call of Soul to Soul, acrossspace, along channels less tangible than Hertzian waves themselves, yetbearing its broken message, which later events had authenticated andstill later cross-questioning had doubly verified. 

He had felt, at such moments, that there were ghostly and phantasmalwires connecting mind with mind; that across these telepathic wires oneanxious spirit could in some way hold dim converse with the other; thatthe Soul itself had its elusive "wireless, " and forever carried andgave out and received its countless messages--if only the fellow-Soulhad learned to await the signal and disentangle the dark and runicCode. Yes, he told himself, as he stood there, thoughtfully, as thoughbound to the spot by some Power not himself, --yes, consciousness waslike that little glass tube which electricians called a coherer, andall his vague impressions and mental-gropings were those disorderly, minute fragments of nickel and silver which only leaped into continuityand order under the shock and impact of those fleet and foreignelectric waves, which floated from some sister consciousness achingwith its undelivered messages. And the woman who had so often calledto him across space and silence, in the past, was now sounding themystic key across those ghostly wires. But what the messages was, orfrom what quarter it came, he could not tell. 

He stood there tortured and puzzled, torn by fear, thrilled and stirredthrough every fiber of his anxious body. This was followed by a senseof terror, sub-conscious and wordless and irrational, the kind ofterror that comes to a child in unknown places, in the dead of someunknown night. 

"_For the love of God, what is it_?" his dry lips demanded, speakingaloud into the emptiness about him. 

He waited, almost as if expecting some answering voice, as distinct andtangible as his own. But nothing broke the black silence thatblanketed him in from the rest of all the world and all its livingthings. The sweat of agony came out on his face; his body hungforward, relaxed and expectant. 

"_What is it you want to say_?" he repeated, in a hoarse and muffledscream, no longer able to endure that silent and nameless Somethingwhich surrounded him. "_What is it you want to say_?"

CHAPTER XXIV

THE GHOSTS OF THOUGHT

In the ensuing silence, as the unbroken seconds dragged themselves on, Durkin called himself a fool, and, struggling bitterly with thatindeterminate uneasiness which possessed him, pulled himself togetherfor some immediate and decisive action. 

He could waste no more time, he told himself, in foolish spiritualisticseances with his own shadow. He had too much before him, and too shorta time in which to do it. His troubles, when he came to face them, would be realities, and not a train of vapid and morbid self-vaporings. 

He advanced further into the darkness of the room, slowly, with hishands outstretched before him. He would feel for the friendly supportand guidance of the metal railing, and then grope his way onward. Foras yet he had only carried the enemy's outposts. Then, for a secondtime, and for no outward reason, he came to a dead halt. He felt as ifsome elusive influence, some unnamable force, was holding and barringhim back. Again he struck a match, recklessly, and again he sawnothing but the burnished metal railing and the dark mass of the vault. 

It was with almost a touch of exasperation that he stood there in histracks, and slowly, methodically, thoroughly, surveyed the fourquarters of the lightless room in which he found himself. Hescrutinized the heavy, enmuffling gloom with straining eyes, first inone direction and then in another. 

There was nothing to be seen, and not a sound reached his ears. He hadbeen in the room perhaps not three minutes, yet it seemed to him asmany hours. Then he peered about him still again, wondering, for thefirst time, by what psychological accident his eyes turned in oneparticular direction, slightly above and before him, to the right ofthe direction in which he was advancing. 

To rid himself of this new idea, and to decentralize the illusion, heshifted his position. But still his gaze, almost against his will, turned back toward the former point, as though the blanketing blacknessheld some core, some discernible central point, toward which he wascompelled to look, as the magnetic needle is compelled to swing towardthe North. Surrendering to this impulse, he gaped through the darknessat it, with a little oath of impatience. 

As he did so he began to feel stir at the base of his spine a tinytremor of apprehension. This tremor seemed suddenly to explode into amounting shudder of fear, flashing and leaping through his body untilthe very hair of his head was stirred and moved with it. 

The next moment the startled body responded to clamoring volition, andhe turned and fled blindly back into the outer passageway, with aludicrous and half-articulate little howl of terror. 

For growing out of the utter blackness he had seen two vague points oflight, two luminous spots, side by side, taking on, as he faced them, all the mysteries of all the primeval night which man ever faced. Hefelt like a hunter, in some jungled midnight, a midnight breathless andsoundless, who looks before him, and slowly discerns two glowing andmotionless balls of fire--who can see nothing else, in all hisworld--but from those two phosphorescent points of light knows that heis being watched and stalked and hunted by some padded Hunger lurkingbehind them. 

In the unbroken and absolute silence which seemed to mock at hisfoolish and stampeding fears, an immediate reaction of spirit set it. He felt almost glad for this material target against which to fling histerrors, for this precipitation of apprehension into something tangible. 

He groped through his bag, hurriedly yet cautiously, for his littlesperm-oil lantern. Then he took up the revolver that lay loosely inhis coat pocket. A moment later a thin little shaft of light dancedand fingered about the inner room. 

He could, at first, see nothing but the line of burnished copperstretching across his path and flashing the light back in his eyes. Behind this, a moment later, he made out the dark and gloomy mass ofthe black safe. Then he looked deeper, with what was still again aflutter of enigmatical fear about his heart, for that twin andghostlike glow which had filled him with such precipitate terror. 

But there was no longer anything to be seen. He played hisinterrogative finger of light up and down, and it was a full minutebefore his slowly-adjusting sight penetrated to the remoter and higherarea of the surrounding walls. 

It was then, and not till then, that he discovered the fact that thewall on his right opened and receded, some five feet above thefloor-level, into a dimly-outlined alcove. As he looked closer he madeout that this alcove had, obviously, been filled by the upper portionof a heavy iron staircase, leading to the floor above. The entirelower half of this stairway, where once it must have obtruded into thevault chamber, had been cut away. It was on the remaining upperportion of this dismantled stairway that his pencil of light playednervously and his gaze was closely riveted. 

For there, above his natural line of vision, half-hidden back in theheavy shadows, his startled eyes made out a huddled and shadowy figure. It was a woman's figure, in black, and motionless. It was bound handand foot to the iron stair-stanchions. 

He did not notice, in that first frenzied glance, the white band thatcut across the lower part of her face, so colorless was her skin. Butas he looked for the second time, he emitted a sudden cry, half-pity, half-anger, for slowly and thinly it filtered into his consciousnessjust what and who that watching figure was. 

And then, and then only, did he speak. And when he did so he repeatedhis earlier cry. 

"My God, Frank, what is it?"

There was no response, no answering movement or gesture. He called toher again, but still absolute silence confronted him. 

As he crept closer to her, step by step, he saw and understood. 

The two luminous eyes, burning through the dark, had been his wife's. She had been imprisoned and tied there; but bound and muffled as shewas, the strength of her desire, the supremacy of will, had created itsnew and mysterious wire of communication. Some passion of want, somesheer intensity of feeling, had found and used its warning semaphore. She had spoken to him, without sound or movement. Yet for what?

Yet for what? That was the thought that seemed to dance back and forthacross the foreground of his busy brain. That was what he wondered anddemanded of himself as he clambered and struggled and panted up thewall into the narrow and dusty alcove, and cut away the sodden gagbetween her aching jaws. The tender flesh was indented and livid, where the tightened band had pressed in under the cheek-bones. Thesalivated throat was swollen, and speechless. The tongue protrudedpitifully, helpless in its momentary paralysis. 

"Oh, he'll smart for this! By heaven, he'll smart for this!" declaredDurkin, as he stooped and cut away the straps that bound her ankles tothe obdurate iron, and severed the bands that bruised and held herwhite wrists. Even then she could not speak, though she smiled alittle, faintly and forlornly and gratefully. She struggled to say oneword, but it resolved itself into a cacophonous and inarticulatemumble, half-infantile, half-imbecile. 

"Oh, he'll pay for this!" repeated the raging man, as he lowered her, limp and inert, to the floor below and leaped down beside her. Shesank back with a happy but husky gasp of weakness, for the benumbedmuscles refused to obey, and the cramped and stiffened limbs wereunable to support her. 

All she could do was to hold her husband's hand in her own, in agrateful yet passionate grip. She must have been imprisoned there, hesurmised, at least an hour, perhaps two hours, perhaps even longer. 

He started up, in search for water. It might be, he felt, that a leadwater-pipe ran somewhere about them. He would cut it withoutcompunction. 

He took two steps across the room, when an audible and terrified noteof warning broke from her swollen lips. He darted back to her, inwonder, searching her straining face with his little shaft of lanternlight. 

She did not speak; but he followed her eyes. They were on theburnished copper railing refracting the thin light that danced back andforth across that dungeon-like chamber. He questioned her fixed gaze, but still he did not understand her. She caught his hand, and retainedit fiercely. He thought, from her pallor, that she was on the point offainting, and he would have placed her full length on the hard cement, but she struggled against it, and still kept her hold on his hand. 

Then she took the tiny lantern from his fingers, and bending low, tapped with it on the cement. Durkin, listening closely, knew she wassounding the telegrapher's double "I"--the call for attention, implyinga message over the wire. 

Slowly he spelt out the words as she gave them to him in Morse, irregular and wavering, but still decipherable. 

"The--railing--is--charged!"

"Charged?" he repeated, as the last word shaped itself in hisquestioning brain. 

He took the lantern from her hand, and swung the shaft of light on theglimmering copper. From there he looked back at her face once more. 

Then, in one illuminating flash of comprehension, it was all clear tohim. With a stare of blank wonder he saw and understood, and fell backappalled at the demoniacal ingenuity of it all. 

"I see! I see!" he repeated, vacuously, almost. 

Then, to make sure of what he had been told, he crossed the room andpicked up the bar of steel that had fallen at his feet as he firstentered the door. This bar he let fall so that one end would rest onthe metal vault-covering and the other on the rail of copper. 

There was a report, a sudden leap of flame, and the continued hissingfury of the short-circuited current, until the bar, heated toincandescence, twisted and writhed where it lay like a thing of life. He drew a deep breath, and watched it. 

That was the danger he had so closely skirted? That was the fate whichhe had escaped!

He stood gazing at the insidious yet implacable agent of death, spluttering its tongue of flame at him like an angry snake; and, as helooked, his face was beaded with sweat, and seemed ashen in color. 

Then a sense of the dangers still surrounding them returned to hismind. He shook himself together, and, making a circuit of the room, found the switch and turned off the current. As he did so he gave alittle muffled cry of gratitude, for across the rear corner of the roomran two leaden water-pipes. Into one of these he cut and drilled withhis pocket-knife, ruthlessly, without a moment's hesitation. He wassuddenly rewarded by a thin jet of water spraying him in the face. Hecaught his hat full of it, and carried it to Frank, who drank from it, feverishly and deeply. It not only brought her strength back to her;but, after it, she could speak a little, though huskily, and withconsiderable pain. 

"Can you walk?"

She signalled, yes. 

"We've got to get out of here, at once!"

He could see that she understood. 

"Can you come now?" he asked. 

She nodded her head, and he helped her to her feet. Together, the oneleaning heavily on the other's arm, they paced up and down the alreadyflooded floor, until power came back to her aching limbs, andsteadiness to her tired nerves. 

"It would be better not to go together. I'll help you out and give youfifty yards' start. If anything should happen, remember that I'mbehind you, and that, after this, I'm ready to shoot, and shoot withouta quaver. "

Again she nodded her head. 

"But listen. When you get up through the sidewalk grating, keepsteadily on for two blocks, toward the west. Then turn north for halfa block, and go into the family entrance at Kieffer's. If nothinghappens, I'll join you there. If anything does occur to keep me back, give them to understand that you've missed the last train for your homein East Orange; put this five-dollar bill down and ask for a front roomon the second floor. From there you must watch for me. If it'sanything dangerous I'll signal you in passing. "

By this time he had led her down the narrow, tunnel-like passageway andwas helping her up into the rain-swept street. 

"Whatever happens, remember that I'm behind you!" he repeated. 

Their struggles, as he assisted her up through the narrow opening, wereungainly and ludicrous; yet, incongruously enough, there came to him afleeting sense of joy in even that accidental and impersonal contact ofher hand with his. 

Then he braced himself against the narrow brick walls where he stood, appearing a strange and grotesque and bodiless head above the level ofthe street. 

Thus peering out, he watched her as she beat her way down thewind-swept sidewalk. Already, through the drifting midnight rain, theoutline of her figure was losing its distinctness. He was reachingdown for his wet and sodden hat, to follow her, when something happenedthat left him transfixed, a motionless and bodiless head on whichstartled horror had suddenly fallen. 

For out of the quiet and shadowy south side of the street, where it hadbeen silently patrolling under lowered speed, swerved and darted awine-colored, surrey-built touring car with a cape top. Durkinrecognized it at a glance; it was Penfield's huge machine. Itsmovement, as it swung in toward the startled woman, seemed like theswoop of a hawk. It appeared to stop only for a moment, but in thatmoment two men leaped from the wide-swung tonneau door. When theyclambered into it once more Durkin saw that Frank was between them. And one of the men was MacNutt, and the other Keenan. 

He heard the one sharp scream that reverberated down the empty street, followed by the fading pulsations of the departing car, when with anoath of fury, he was already working his arms up through the narrowmanhole. As he did so he heard a second, hoarser cry, succeeded by theheavy tramp of hurrying feet, and then a peremptory challenge. 

Turning sharply, he caught sight of a patrolling roundsman, bearingdown on him from the corner of Broadway; and he saw that the officerwas drawing his revolver as he charged across the wet pavement. 

It was already too late to free himself. With an instinctive movementof the hands he caught up the manhole cover, shield-like. As he did sohe saw the glimmer of the polished steel and heard the repeatedchallenge. But he neither paused nor hesitated. He let his kneesbreak under him, and as he fell he saw to it that the rim of themanhole dropped into its waiting circular groove. Then he heard thesound of a shot, of a second and a third, from the policeman's pistol. But as he secured the cover with its chainlock, and dropped down intothe tunnel below, the reports seemed thin and muffled and far away toDurkin. 

A moment later, however, he heard the ominous and vibrant echo of theofficer's night-stick, on the asphalt, frenziedly rapping forassistance. 

CHAPTER XXV

THE RULING PASSION

Beyond that first involuntary little cry of terror Frances Durkinuttered no sound, as she found herself in the hooded tonneau, wedged inbetween MacNutt and Keenan. That first outcry, indeed, had beenunwilled and automatic, the last reactionary movement of an overtriedand exhausted body. 

A wave of care-free passivity now seemed to inundate her. She made noattempt to struggle; she nursed no sense of open resentment against hercaptors. The battery of her vital forces was depleted and depolarized. She experienced only a faintly poignant sense of disappointment, ofindeterminate pique, as she realized that she was no longer a freeagent. Leaning back in the cushioned gloom, inert, impassive, with hereyes half-closed, she seemed to be drifting through an eddying veil ofgray. The voices so close beside her sounded thin and far off. Animpression of unreality clung to her, an impression that she wasfloating through an empty and rain-swept world from which all life andwarmth had withered. 

"It's not _her_ I want--it's Durkin!" MacNutt was saying, with an oath, as they swung around the corner into the blinking and serried lights ofEighth avenue. "It's that damned groundhog I'm goin' to dig out yet!"

"Well, you can't go back _there_ after him!" protested Keenan. 

"Can't I? Well, I'm goin' back, and I'm goin' to get that man, and I'mgoin' to fry him in his own juices!"

He pushed the woman's inert weight away from him, and leaned out fromunder the cape, with a sharp word or two to Penfield's chauffeur. Thenhe suddenly whistled and waved his arm. 

"What are you doing that for?" Keenan demanded of him. 

Keenan had caught the drooping figure, and was making an effort tosupport it. His face, for some unknown reason, was almost as colorlessas the face that lay so passively against his rain-soaked shoulder. 

"I'm goin' back!" declared MacNutt. 

"Is it worth while--now?" demurred the other. 

"I'm goin' to get my hooks on Durkin, even if I have to wade throughevery raidin' gang in the precinct!"

"And then what?" deprecated Keenan. 

"Then I'll meet you at Penfield's house, uptown, and the show will cometo a finish!"

"And what am I expected to do?" demanded Keenan, impatiently. For theapproaching four-wheeler had come to a standstill beside them, andMacNutt was already out in the rain. 

"You take care o' _that_!" he pointed a contemptuous finger toward themotionless woman, "and mighty good care!"

"But how's all this going to help us out?"

"I'll show you, when the time comes. Here's the key for Penfield'shouse. You'll find it nice and quiet and secluded there, and if I _do_bring Durkin back with me, by heaven, you'll have the privilege o'seein' a lurid end to this uncommonly lurid game!"

He tossed the key into the tonneau. Keenan picked it up in silence. 

They heard the clatter of the horses' hoofs on the wet asphalt, thesharp closing of the cab door, the rattle of the wheel-tires across thesteel car-tracks, and he was gone. A moment later they were dipping upthe avenue between two long rows of undulating lights, with the raindrifting in on their faces. 

Then Keenan turned and looked down at the woman beside him. Duringseveral minutes of unbroken silence Frank nursed the dim consciousnessof his keen and scrutinizing glance. But her mind seemed encaged in abody that was already dead; she had neither the will nor the power tolook up at him. 

Then, with no warning word or gesture, he stooped down and kissed heron her heavy red mouth. 

At any other time, she knew, she would have fought against thattainting touch; every drop of red blood in her body would have risen tocombat it. But now she neither repulsed it nor responded to it. Sheseemed submerged and smothered in a tide of terrible indifference. Sheeven found herself weighing the meaning of that affront to all that wasnot ignoble in her. 

She even caught at it, with an inward gasp of enlightenment. It meantmore than she had at first seen. It brought a new scene to theshifting drama; it meant a new turn to the hurrying game. It meantthat if she only waited, and could be wise and wary and calculating, she still might hug to her breast some tattered hope for the impendingend. 

She knew that Keenan was still watching her; she knew that he was, insome manner, being torn between contending feelings, that someobliterating impulse was falling between him and that grim concert offorces of which he was a member. It was the shadow of passion fallingacross the paths of duty--it was the play and the problem as old as theworld. 

And what was she, then? That was the question she asked herself, witha little sobbing gasp--what was she, trading thus, even in thought, onher bruised and wearied body? What had she fallen to, what was it thathad deadened all that was softer and better and purer within her, thatshe could thus see slip away from her the last solace and dignity ofher womanhood?

There, she told herself bitterly, lay the degradation and the ultimatedanger of the life she had led. It was there that the grimmer tragedycame into her career. The surrender of ever greater and greaterhostages to expediency, the retreat to ever meaner and meanerinstruments of activity, the gradual induration of heart and soul, thedesperate and ever more desperate search for self-deceivingextenuations, for self-blinding condonement, for pitiful and distortingself-propitiation--in these lay the inward corruption, more implacablyand more terribly tragic than any outward blow! She had once deludedherself with the thought that a life of crime might lose at least halfof its evil by losing all of its grossness. She had even consoledherself with the thought that it was the offender against life who sawdeepest into life. It was but natural, she had always argued withherself, that the thwarted consciousness, that the erring and sufferingheart, should yield deeper insight into the dark and complicated rangesof spiritual truth than could the soul forever untried and unshaken. The tempted and troubled heart, from its lonely towers of unhappiness, must ever see further into the meaning of things than could thosecomfortably normal and healthy souls who suffered little because theyventured little. She had ventured much, and she had lost much. Shehad thought to hold some inmost self aloof and immune. She had dreamedthat some inward irreproachability of thought, some light-hearted tactof open conduct, might leave still untainted that deeper core ofthought and feeling which she had long thought of as conscience, whilesome deceiving and sophistical transmutation of values whispered to heradroitly that in some way all good might be bad, and that all bad mightin some way be good. 

But that, she now knew, was a mockery. She was the sum of all that shehad thought and acted. She was a disillusioned and degraded andunscrupulous woman, steeped in enormities so dark that it appalled andsickened her even to recall them. She was only the empty and corrodedshell of a woman, all that once aspired and lived and hoped in hereaten away by the acid currents of that underground world into whichshe had fallen. 

Yet rather than it should end in that slow and mean and sordid innertragedy of the spirit, she told herself fiercely, she would fling openher last arsenal of passion and come to her end in some ironic blaze ofglory that would at least lend sinister radiance to a timelessly baseand sorry eclipse. So she lay back in Keenan's clasp quiescently, unresistingly, but watchfully. For she knew that the end, whatever itmight be, was not far away. 

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CROWN OF IRON

Durkin's first feeling, as he scrambled to his feet and half-stumbled, half-groped his way along the narrow, tunnel-like passage, was anuntimely and impotent and almost delirious passion to get out into theopen and fight--fight to the last, if need be, for all that narrowinglife still held for him. This feeling was followed by a quick sense offrustration as he realized his momentary helplessness and howcomprehensive and relentless seemed the machinery of intrigue opposinghim. 

Yet, he told himself with that lightning-like rapidity of thought whichcame to him at such moments of peril, however intricate and vast themachinery, however carefully planned the line of impending campaign, the human element would be an essential part of it. And his lastforlorn hope, his final fighting chance, lay in the fact that whereverthe human element entered there also entered weakness and passion andthe possibility of accident. 

What now remained to him, he warned himself as he hurriedly locked andbarred the two steel doors which shut off the first and secondpassageway, was to think quickly and act decisively. Somewhere, atsome unforeseen moment, his chance might still come to him. 

As for himself, he felt that he was safe enough, for the time being. The officer who had detected him in the manhole would be sure to followup a case so temptingly suspicious. The police, in turn, could takeopen advantage of an intrusion so obviously unauthorized and ominous ashis own, and find in it ample excuse for investigating a quarter whichfor many months must have been under suspicion. But, under anycircumstances, well guarded as that poolroom fortress stood, itsresistance could be only a matter of time, and of strictly limitedtime, once the reserves were on the scene. 

Durkin's first thought, accordingly, was of the roof, for, so far as heknew, all escape from the ground floor was even then cut off. Yet thefirst door leading from the vault chamber he found to be steel-boundand securely locked. He surmised, with a gasp of consternation, thatthe doors above him would be equally well secured. He remembered thatPenfield never did things by halves, and he felt that his only escapelay in that upward flight. 

So he saw that it was to be a grim race in demolition; that while hewas to gnaw and eat his way upward through steel and brick, like astarving rat boring its passage up through the chambers of a hugegranary, his pursuers would be pounding and battering at the lowerdoors in just as frenzied pursuit. 

He no longer hesitated, but moved with that clear-thoughted rapidity ofaction which often came to him in his moments of half-delirium. Turning to his tool-bag and scooping out his bar of soap, he kneadedtogether enough of the nitroglycerine from one of the stout rubber bagsto make a mixture of the consistency of liquid honey. This he quicklybut carefully worked into the crack of the obstructing door. Then heattached his detonator, and shortened and lighted his fuse, scuttlingback to the momentary shelter of the outer passage, making sure to bebeyond the deadly "feathered radius" of the nitro. 

There he waited behind the steel-bound door for the coming detonation. The sound of it smote him like a blow on the chest, followed by a rushof air and a sudden feeling of nausea. 

But he did not wait. He groped his way in, relocked the passage doorand crawled on all fours through the smoke and heavy, malodorous gases. 

The remnants of the blasted door hung, like a tattered pennon, on onetwisted hinge, and his way now lay clear to the ladder of grilledironwork leading to the floor above. But here the steel trapdoor againbarred his progress. One sharp twist and wrench with his steel lever, however, tore the bolt-head from its setting, and in anotherhalf-minute he was standing on the closed door above, shutting out thenoxious smoke from the basement. 

Between him and the stairway stood still another fortified door, heavier than the others. He did not stop to knead his paste, foralready he could hear the crash of glass and the sound of sledges onthe door at the rear of the cigar-shop. Catching up a strand of whathe knew to be the most explosive of all guncottons--it wascellulose-hexanitrate--he worked it gently into the open keyhole andagain scuttled back to safety as the fuse burnt down. 

He could feel the building shake with the tremor of the detonation, shake and quiver like a ship pounded by strong head seas. A remotewindow splintered and crashed to the floor, sucked in by theatmospheric inrush following the explosion-vacuum. He noticed, too, ashe mounted the narrow stairs before him, that he was bleeding at thenose. But this, he told himself, was no time for resting. For at thehead of the second stairway still another sheet of armored steelblocked his passage, and still again the hurried, hollow detonationshook the building. The ache in his head, behind and above the eyes, became almost unbearable; his stomach revolted at the poisonous gasesthrough which he was groping. But he did not stop. 

As he twisted and pried with his steel lever at the lock of thetrapdoor that stood between him and the open air of the housetop, hecould already hear the telltale splintering of wood and sharp ordersand muffled cries and the approaching, quick tramping of feet. Hefought at the lock like a madman, for by this time the trampling feetwere mounting the upper stairs, and doors were being battered andwrenched from their hinges. He had at least made their work easy forthem; he had torn open the heart of Penfield's stronghold; he hadblazed a path for those officers of the law who had bowed before theinaccessibility of the building he had disrupted single-handed!

"Good!" he cried, in his frenzied delight. "Give it to them good!Wreck 'em, once for all; put 'em out of business!"

Then he gave a sudden relieving "Ah!"--for the sullen wood hadsurrendered its bolts, and the door swung open to his upward push. Thenight wind, cold and damp and clean, swept his hot and grimy face as hepulled himself up through the opening. 

Even as he did so he heard the gathering sounds below him growingclearer and clearer. He squatted low in the darkness, and with afurtive eye ever on the dismantled trapdoor, groped his way, gorilla-like, closer and closer to the wall against which he knew thejanitor's ladder to be still leaning. 

Then he dropped flat on his face, and wormed his way toward the nearestchimney, not twelve feet from him, for a wet helmet had emerged fromthe trap opening. A moment later a lantern was flashing and playingabout the rainy roof. 

"We've got 'em! Quick, Lanigan; we've got 'em!" cried the helmetedhead exultantly, from the trapdoor, to someone below. 

The next moment Durkin, prone on his face, heard the crack of arevolver and the impact of the ball as it ricochetted from theroof-tin, not a yard from his feet. 

He no longer tried to conceal himself, but, rolling and tumbling towardthe eave-cornice, let himself over, and hung and clung there by hishands, while a second ball whistled over him. 

He felt desperately along the flat brick surface, with his kickingfeet, wondering if he had misjudged his direction, sick with a fearthat he might be dangling over an open abyss. He shifted the weight ofhis body along the cornice ledge, still pawing and feeling, feverishlyand ridiculously, with his gyrating limbs. Then a joy of relief sweptthrough him. The ladder was there, and his feet were already on itssecond step. 

As he ran, cat-like, across the lower apartment-house roof, he knewthat he stood in full range of his pursuers above, and he knew that bythis time they were already crowding out to the cornice-ledge. Therewas no time for thought. He did not pause to look back at them, toweigh either the problem or the possible consequences in his mind; heonly remembered that that afternoon he had noticed five crowded linesof washing swinging in multi-colored disarray at the back of thatmany-familied hive of life. He hesitated only once, at the sheer edgeof the roof, to make sure, in the uncertain half-light, that he wasabove those crowded lines. 

"Let him have it--there he goes!" cried a voice above, and at that toowarning note his hesitation took wing. 

Durkin leaped out into space, straddling the first line of soddenclothes as he fell. Even in that brief flight the thought came to hismind that it would have been infinitely better for him if the fallingrain had not weighted and flattened those sagging lines of washing. Then he remembered, more gratefully, that it was probably only becauseof the rain that they still swung there. 

As his weight came on the first line it snapped under the blow, as didthe second, which he clutched with his hands, and the third, which hedoubled over, limply, and the fourth, which cut up under his arm-pit. But as he went downward he carried that ever-growing avalanche ofcotton and woolen and linen with him, so that when his sprawling figuresmote the stone court it fell muffled and hidden in a web of tangledgarments. 

CHAPTER XXVII

THE STRAITS OF CHANCE

How his flight ended Durkin never clearly remembered. He had a dim anduneasy memory of the lapse of time, either great or little, theconfused recollection of waking to his senses and fighting his way freefrom a smothering weight of wet and clinging clothes. As he struggledto his feet a stab of pain shot through his left hand, and up throughhis forearm. It was so keen and penetrating that he surmised, in hisblank and unreasoning haste, that he must have torn a chord or broken abone in his wrist. But on a matter like that, he felt, he could nowwaste no time. 

If he had, indeed, been unconscious, he concluded, it had been butmomentary. For as he groped about in search of his hat, dazed andbruised, he found himself still alone and unmolested. Creeping throughthe apartment-house cellar, and out past the door of the snoring andstill undisturbed janitor, he crouched for a waiting moment or twobehind an overloaded garbage-can, in the area. 

Hearing nothing, he staggered up the narrow stairs to the level of thesidewalk, wet and ragged and disheveled, blackened and soiled andbegrimed. The street seemed deserted. 

He felt sick and faint and shaken, but he would not give up. Hehalf-stumbled, half-staggered along, splashing through little pools ofrain held in depressions of the stone sidewalk, supporting himself onanything that offered, hoping, if this were indeed the end, that hemight crawl away into some dark and secluded corner of the city, tohide the humiliating ignominy of it all. 

In front of a Chinese laundry window he saw that he could go nofurther. His first impulse was to creep inside, and make an effort tobribe his way to secrecy, although he knew that within another quarterof an hour the tightening cordon of the police would entirely surroundthe block. 

As he swayed there, hesitating, he heard the thunder of hoofs and therumble of wheel-tires on the soggy asphalt. His first apprehensivethought was that it would prove to be a patrol-wagon, with policereserves from some neighboring precinct. But as he blinked through thedarkness he made out a high-platformed Metropolitan Milk Company'sdelivery-wagon swinging down toward him. 

He staggered, with a slow and heavy wading motion, out to the centre ofthe street, a strange and spectral figure, with outstretched arms, uttering a sharp and halting cry or two. 

The driver pulled up, thirty long and dreary feet past him. 

"What in hell d'you want?" he demanded irately, raising his whip tostart his team once more, as he caught a clearer view of the seeminglydrunken figure. 

"I'll give you a fiver, " said Durkin thickly, "if you'll gi' me a lift!"

He held the money in his hand, as he stumbled and panted to thewagon-step. That put an end to all argument. 

"Climb in, then--quick!" cried the big driver, as he caught hispassenger by a tattered coat sleeve and helped him up into thehigh-perched seat. 

"But for the love o' God, who's been doin' things to you?" he went on, in amazement, as he saw the bruised and bleeding and ash-colored face. 

"They threw me out o' their damned dope shop!" cried Durkin, with anonly half-simulated thickness of utterance, as he jerked a shakingthumb toward the lights of the Chinese laundry. "And I guess--I'm--I'ma bit knocked out!"

For he felt very weak and faint and weary, though the cold rain and theopen night air beat on his upturned face with a sting that wasgratefully refreshing. 

"They certainly did make a mess o' you!" chortled the unmoved driver, as they rumbled westward and took the corner with a skid of the greatwheels that struck fire from even the wet car-tracks. He tucked thebill down in his oil-coat pocket. 

"Feelin' sick, ain't you?"

"Yes!"

"Where d'you want to go?" he asked more feelingly. 

"Where d'you go?" parried Durkin. 

"Hoboken Ferry, for th' Lackawanna Number Eight!"

"Then that'll do me, " answered the other weakly. 

He leaned back in his high and rocking seat, grasping the back railwith his right hand. He felt as if the waves of a troubled andtumultuous sea were throwing him up, broken and torn, on some island ofpossible safety. He felt dizzy, as though he were being tossed andplunged forward to some narrow bar of impending release and rest. Hedid not ask of himself just what seas boomed and thundered on theopposing side of that narrow stretch of promised security. He knewthat they were there, and he knew that the time would soon come when hemust face and feel them about him. He had once demanded rest; but heknew that there now could be no rest for him, until the end. He mighthide for a day or two, like a hunted animal with its hurt, but thehounds of destiny would soon be at his heels again. All he asked, hetold himself, was his man's due right of momentary relapse, hisbreathing spell of quietness. He was already too stained and scarredwith life to look for the staidly upholstered sanctuaries, the paddedseclusions of simple and honest wayfarers. He was broken and undone, but his day would come again. 

He looked at his limp and trailing left hand. To his consternation, hesaw that it dripped blood. He tried to push back his coat sleeve, butthe pain was more than he could endure. So with his right hand helifted the helpless arm up before his eyes, as though it were somethingnot his own flesh and blood, and for the first time saw the splinter ofbone that protruded from the torn flesh, just below the wrist-joint. 

He felt for his handkerchief, dizzily, and tried to bandage the wound. This he never accomplished, for with a sudden little gasp he faintedaway, and fell prone across the oil-skinned lap of the big driver. 

That astounded person drew up in alarm at the side entrance of astreet-corner saloon. He was on the point of repeating his sturdy callfor help, when a four-wheeler swung in beside his wagon-step, anddelivered itself of a square-shouldered, heavy-jawed figure, muffled tothe ears in a rain-coat. The newcomer took in the situation with arapid and comprehensive glance of relief. 

"So there he is, at last!" he said, as he came forward and caught upthe relaxed and still unconscious figure. 

"Where'd you get a license for buttin' in on this?" expostulated thesurprised driver. 

"Buttin' in?" cried the man in the raincoat, as he lifted the limpfigure in his great, gorilla-like arms. "This isn't buttin' in--thisis takin' care o' my own friends!"

"Friend o' yours, then, is he?" queried the weakening driver. 

"A friend o' mine!" cried the other angrily, for his man was alreadysafely in the cab. "You damned can-slinger, d'you suppose I'm wastin'cab-fare doin' church rescue work? Of course he's a friend o' mine. 

"And not only that, " he added, under his breath, as he swung up intothe cab and gave the driver the number of Penfield's uptown house, "andnot only that--he's a friend o' mine who's worth just a little over aquarter of a million to me!"

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE HUMAN ELEMENT

It was slowly, almost reluctantly, that Durkin returned to full andclear-thoughted consciousness. Even before he had opened his eyes herealized that he was in a hurrying carriage, for he could feel everysway and jolt of the thinly cushioned seat. He could also hear thebeat of the falling rain on the hood-leather, and on the glass of thedoor beside him, as he lay back in the damp odors of wet and soddenupholstery. 

Then he half-opened his eyes, slowly, and saw that it was MacNuttbeside him. 

The discovery neither moved nor startled him; he merely let the heavylids fall over his tired eyes once more, and lay there, without amovement or a sign. 

Tatter by tatter he pieced together the history of the past few hours, and as memory came tardily back to him he knew, in a dim and shadowyway, that he would soon need every alertness of mind and body which hecould summon to his help. But still he waited, passive andunbetraying, fighting against a weakness born of great pain and fatigue. 

He was keenly conscious of the cab's abrupt stopping, of the passing ofmoney between MacNutt and the lean and dripping night-hawk holding thereins, of being half-carried and half-dragged, in the great, bear-likegrasp of his captor, across the wet sidewalk, to the foot of a flightof brownstone steps. These steps were wide and ponderous, and led upto an equally wide and ponderous-looking doorway crowned withornamental figures of marble on a sandstone background. These carvenfigures, wet and glistening in the light of the street-lamps, stood outincongruously gloomy and ghostly, like the high relief on a sarcophagus. 

Instead of mounting the steps, however, MacNutt hauled his captivelimply in under their shadow, to the basement door opening off thestone-flagged area. There, after fumbling with his keys for a momentor two, he quietly unlocked the heavy outer grating of twisted ironworkand then the inner door of oak. Durkin made a mental note of the factthat both of these doors were in turn locked after them. 

The two then made their way through the darkness down what must havebeen a long passage. Its floor was padded with carpet, and somefugitive and indefinable odor seemed to suggest to the prisoner anatmosphere of well-being, of a house both carefully furnished andscrupulously managed. 

MacNutt softly opened a door on the right, and, after listening for acautious moment or two, as softly entered the room into which this doorled. And still again a key was turned and withdrawn from the lock. 

Even with his eyes closed Durkin, as he lay there husbanding hisstrength, was conscious of the sudden light that flooded the room. Covertly opening that eye which remained in the heavy shadow, separating the lashes by little more than the width of a hair, he couldmake out a large room, upholstered and carpeted in green, withgreen-shaded electroliers above two billiard tables that stood ghastlyand bier-like beneath their blanketing covers of white cotton. Againstthe walls stood massive, elephantine club chairs of green fumed oak, and it was into one of these that MacNutt had dropped the inert andunresponding Durkin. At the far end of the room the stealthy observercould make out what was assuredly the entrance to an electric elevator. In fact, as he looked closer he could see the two mother-of-pearlbuttons which controlled the apparatus; for it was plain that thiselevator was one of those automatic lifts not uncommon in cityresidences of the more palatial order. 

Then, as he quietly but busily speculated on the significance of thisdiscovery, Durkin suddenly caught sight of a triple crescent carved onthe arm of the chair against which he leaned. And as he made out thatfamiliar device he knew that he was in Penfield's uptown house onceused as his residence and later as his private clubrooms. 

At this discovery his alert but well-veiled glance went back toMacNutt. He saw his captor fling off his wet and draggled raincoat andthen shake the water from a dripping hat-brim. This he seemed to dowithout haste and without emotion. 

Durkin next saw his enemy gaze about the entire circle of the roomscrutinizingly, the subdolous green eyes coming to a rest only whenthey fell on his own relaxed figure. 

"And this is where the music starts!" muttered MacNutt aloud, as hestrode toward Durkin. 

Even before he had uttered that half-articulate little sentence hiscaptive was possessed by a sudden conviction of approaching climax. Heknew, somewhere deep in the tangled roots of consciousness, that eitherhe or the other must go down that night, that one was destined to winand that the other was destined to lose, that the ancient fight wasabout to be settled, and settled for all time. 

In that agonized and hurried and yet lucid-thoughted summing up ofultimate values Durkin realized that it would be useless to resist whatwas immediately before him. He was too shaken and weak for any crudebattle of brute strength against brute strength. With his woundedhand, which even then sent throbbing spears of pain from finger-tip toshoulder, and with his bruised and weary and stiffened body, he knewthat any test of strength in the muscular and ape-like arms of MacNuttwas out of the question. So he lay back, weak and unresisting, everynow and then emitting from his half-opened lips a little moan of pain. 

But behind the torn and battered ramparts of the seemingly comatosebody his vigilant mind paced and watched and kept keenly awake. As hefelt the great hands pad and feel about his body, and the searchingfingers go through his clothes, pocket after pocket, some sentinelintelligence seemed to watch and burn and glow like a coal deep withinthe ashes of all his outer fatigue. He waited quiescent, as he feltthe heated, animal-like breath on his face, as the ruthlessly exploringhands tore open his vest, as they ripped away the inner pocket whichhad been so carefully sewn together at the top, as they drew out thetied and carefully sealed packet of papers for which he had beensearching. 

More than once Durkin thought that if ever those documents, for whichhe had endured and suffered and lost so much, were again wrested fromhim, it would be only after some moment of transcendent conflict, aftersome momentous battle of life's forlornest last reserves. Yet now, impassively and ignominiously, he was surrendering them to theconqueror, supinely, meanly, without even the solace of some supreme ifvain resistance! He listened to MacNutt's gloating little "Ah!" oftriumph without a sign or movement. But, even then, in that moment ofseeming frustration, Durkin's subterranean yet terriblepertinaciousness, his unparaded bull-dog indefatigability, glowed andburned at its brightest. They were not yet in their last ditch. 

"That's _one_ part of it!" muttered MacNutt, as he stowed away thepacket and rebuttoned his coat. 

It was a shadowed and lupine eye which Durkin cautiously opened as hefelt more than heard MacNutt's quick footsteps on the carpeted floor. Covertly, and without moving, he saw the other man walk to theelevator, saw the play of his finger on the mother-of-pearl button, sawthe automatic door noiseless slide away, and the descended and waitingcage locked on a level with the floor. He saw MacNutt step inside, andthe finger again play on one of a row of five pearl buttons set in thepolished wood of the cage-wall, and the elevator noiselessly ascend. 

The moment it went up Durkin was on his feet. 

He first ran to the two doors at the opposite end of the billiard-room. They were both securely locked; and they were his only means of escape. Then he hurriedly circled the two huge tables, in search of someimplement of defense. But the denuded room offered nothing. 

Then he dashed to the elevator shaft. As he had surmised, it was anautomatic electric lift, operating from the cellar below to the top ofthe house. The cage, so far as he could make out, now stood oppositethe third floor. The controlling apparatus, the motor into which thepower wires led, was, of course, in the cellar beneath him. It wouldbe easy enough to twist one of the billiard-table covers into a rope, and drop down to the shaft-bottom, twelve feet below. There he couldtie a bit of string to the emergency switch, watch the first movementof the descending cage, and shut off the current at the right moment. That would mean that the descending cage, robbed of its power, wouldhang a dead weight in its steel channel, the safety brake wouldautomatically apply itself, and anybody within the cage would remainlocked and imprisoned there, halfway between floors, helpless todescend or ascend, hemmed in by the four blank walls of the shift. 

He decided not even to waste time on twisting up a table-cover. Hewould hang by his right hand, and drop to the bottom. But a suddenglint and flutter of light reminded him of his danger. The cage wasdescending. 

It was only a matter of seconds before MacNutt stepped once more fromthe cage into the billiard-room, yet as he did so he saw nothing butthe still limp and relaxed form of Durkin, huddled back in his hugechair, emitting from between his half-parted lips an occasional weakgroan of pain. 

A gloating and half-demoniacal chuckle broke from the newcomer's lips. In one hand he carried a decanter of brandy, in the other a seltzersiphon. Durkin could hear the gurgle and ripple of the liquid into theglass; a moment later he knew that MacNutt was bending over him. 

"Here, you, wake up out o' that!" he said, with still another chuckleof ominous glee. 

He shook the relaxed figure roughly. 

"Get awake, there! This is _too_ good--this is something you can'tafford to miss, you damned welcher!"

He poured the scalding liquor down the other's throat. Some of itspilled and ran into the hollow of his neck; some of it dribbled on hislimp collar and his coat lapels. But Durkin took what he could, andwas glad of it. The pain of his wounded arm was very acute. 

"Kind o' recalls our first meetin', eh?" demanded MacNutt, as hewatched the other slowly open his wondering eyes. "Kind o' remind youof the day I loosened you up with brandy and seltzer, that first time Ihad to drag and coax you into this dirty business?"

And again his captor laughed, wickedly, mirthlessly. 

"Go on, take some more! I'm goin' to give you enough to light you allto glory!" he gloated. And still he poured the liquor down theunresisting man's throat. 

He dragged the other to his feet. 

"Come on now, quick! There's a little scene waitin' for youupstairs--something that'll kind o' soothe and console you for gettin'so done up!"

They were in the elevator by this time, mounting noiselessly upward. Durkin could feel the fire of the brandy soar up to his brain and singthrough his veins. MacNutt supported him as they stepped from theelevator cage into a darkened room. On the far side of this room, frombetween two heavy portières, a gash of light cut into the otherwiseunbroken gloom. 

A sound of voices floated out to them and MacNutt tightened his grip onthe other's arm, as they stood and listened, for it was Frances Durkinand Keenan talking together, hurriedly, impetuously, earnestly. 

"But does it make any difference what I have been, or who I am?" thewoman's voice was asking. "I did my part; I did my work for you. Nowyou ought to give me a chance!"

Still holding the other back, MacNutt circled sidewise, until they cameinto the line of vision with the unsuspecting pair in the other room. Keenan, they could see, held one heavy hand on the woman's shoulder, intimately; and she, in turn, looked up into his face, in an attitudeas open and intimate. 

"You know, now, what I have known before you!" whispered MacNutt, intothe ear of the tortured Durkin. 

"You lie!" murmured Durkin's lips, but no sound came from them, for hisstaring eyes were still on the scene before him. 

"Listen then, you fool!" was all his tempter whispered back. And theystood together, listening. 

"But I _am_ giving you a chance, " Keenan next replied, and his long, melancholy Celtic face was white and colorless with emotion. "I'mgiving 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. Instead, shereached up her own seemingly wearied and surrendering arms, without aword, and held him there in her obliterating embrace. He swayed alittle, where he stood, and for a moment neither moved nor spoke. 

MacNutt, narrowly watching the shadowy face of Durkin, saw pictured onthat pallid and changing countenance fear and revolt, one momentarytouch of despairing doubt, and then a mounting and all-consumingpassion of blind rage. 

In that drunken rage seemed to culminate all his misgivings, hissuspicions, his apparent betrayals of the past. He trembled and shooklike a man in a vertigo; the fingers of his upraised right hand openedand closed spasmodically; his flaccid lips fell apart, vacuously, insanely. 

"I'll kill her!" he ejaculated under his breath. MacNutt knew that hismoment had come. 

Without a spoken word he caught his revolver up from his coat pocket. Then he thrust it, craftily, into the other man's hand. 

The insane fingers closed on the handle of it, the glaring andexpressionless eye peered along the steadying barrel. MacNutt held hisbreath, and waited. It must be soon, he knew, before the moment ofmadness had burnt itself out. 

The woman under the white light of the electrolier drew back fromKeenan, with her eyes still on his face, so that her head and shouldersstood out, a target of black against the white fore-ground. Then shedrew one hand quickly across her forehead, and, wheeling slowly, lether puzzled glance sweep the entire circle of the room, until once moreher eyes rested upon the expectant eyes of Keenan. 

Durkin, through all his rage, shut his teeth on a sudden sob. It wasall over. It was the end. 

A change suddenly swept across the woman's face, a light of exaltationleaped into her dilated pupils, and her hand went up to her heart. 

Was it some small sound or movement that she had heard, or was it someminute vibration of floor that she had felt?

"_Jim, it's you_!" she shrilled out suddenly, into the heavy silence, in a tense and high soprano, with a voice not like her own. 

"_Jim, where are you_?" she called passionately, as she beat Keenanimpotently back with her naked hands. "Help me, quick! Can't you seeI need you? Can't you see this is _killing me_?"

Keenan fell back before her, aghast. 

"You fool, you weak fool!" she shrieked at him madly. "Do you think Imeant that? Do you dream I could respect or care for an animal likeyou! Do you imagine I would endure the touch of your hands, if itwasn't to save me till this? Do you dream----?"

She stopped suddenly, for with one sweep of his advancing arm Durkintore the heavy portière from its curtain-rings, and he stood beforethem, in the flat white light of the electrics. 

CHAPTER XXIX

THE LAST DITCH

Durkin advanced into the room quickly, the revolver in his right hand. It was a short-barreled bull-dog gun of heavy caliber, ugly andmenacing as it swung from his out-thrust wrist, held low, with theright elbow pressed close in to his side. In the doorway stoodMacNutt. His eyes were staring, his bullock head thrown back, bewildered at the sudden change that one sweep of an arm had brought tothe scene. 

As Durkin edged craftily round, with his back to the side wall, so thathis eye commanded the silent trio before him, Frank made a movement todraw away from Keenan, who stood grotesquely petrified, his lean jawfallen, the melancholy Celtic face touched more with wonder than withfear. 

"Don't move!" commanded her husband, as he saw the motion. "Stay whereyou are!"

She looked at him, as bewildered as the others. 

"That man, you'll find, is armed. "

"You lie--you fool!"

"That man, I say, is armed!"

Keenan laughed, scoffingly. 

"Take his revolver from him!" commanded Durkin. 

A momentary hesitation held her back. 

"Take it, I say! And, by God, if he so much as moves a finger, I'llblow the top of his head off!"

The woman confronted Keenan once more, but he fell back a step or two. 

"There's no need of that, " he broke in angrily. "If you want the gun, I'll give it to you!"

And as he spoke his arm swung down and back to his hip pocket. 

"Stop that!" cried Durkin sharply, as he saw the movement. "Keep thosehands up, or, by heaven, I'll let you have it!"

His arm, by this time, was tense and rigidly out-stretched, and hissteady pistol-barrel pointed just between the other man's ludicrouslyblinking eyes. In the silence that followed the woman reached back, and without further hesitation drew the revolver from the motionlessman's pocket. 

It was a formidable, long-barreled "Colt, " which, with one sharp motionof the fingers, she promptly unlimbered, exposing the breech. In eachcylinder chamber, she saw, lay a loaded cartridge. Once assured ofthis, she snapped shut the breech and balanced the gun in thepurposeful embrace of her fingers. 

"Now what?" she asked, with her eyes turned to her husband. But thetriumph suddenly died out of her face. 

She was only in time to hear Durkin's sharp cry of anger, and to seehis quick spring through the wide door-way, as the guard-door of theelevator closed and the cage shot up into space. 

"We've missed him!" he gasped, with a cry of rage, as he ran to thedoor through which MacNutt, in that moment of excitement, haddisappeared. 

Frank kept her eyes on Keenan. She, too, began to feel the sense ofsome vast finality in their moves and actions that night. 

Keenan laughed. It was a dry and joyless laugh, but it wasdiscouraging. 

"What's on the floor above?" demanded Durkin, wheeling on him. 

"The floor above, " slowly responded the other, "is Richard Penfield'sprivate offices, where his safe is, and where your friend, no doubt, isnow depositing his valuables, behind a burglar-proof time-lock!"

"Oh, that's it, is it!" cried Durkin. He turned to the woman sharply. 

"Frank, quick! Leave Keenan to me!"

"Yes!" she answered, with coerced attention. 

"MacNutt must not get out of this house! We must stop him before hegets down this shaft. You go down by the stairs, quick, to the lowestbasement. You'll find the motor operating the elevator. What you mustdo is to get to the switch, and shut off the power before this car canget past us! Quick!"

He still faced Keenan, but his eye followed her to the door. 

"If he does come, kill him; shoot him down, I say, like a dog--_orhe'll kill you_!"

He could hear, through those silent hallways, the muffled rustling ofher skirts and the sound of her flying feet on the waxed and polishedwood. Then the silence suddenly became oppressive. 

It was the unseen foe that he was afraid of, the undiscerned force thathe feared. His uneasy and alert mind struggled to grasp the problem ofhow and where MacNutt would strike, if strike he did, out of thedarkness of that silent and deserted house. 

Durkin decided that above all things he must render impossible thedescent of the elevator cage. But for a moment he could think of nobar that might be flung across the path of that complex and almostirresistible machinery, once awakened into its full power. Then thesolution of the riddle came to him. 

Still menacing the silent Keenan with his revolver, he flung over, withone quick and reckless push of his foot, the heavy mahogany table thatstood in the centre of the room. 

Then he turned to Keenan. 

"Push that table out into the elevator shaft!" he ordered. The otherman did not move. And time was precious; every second was precious!

Durkin repeated his command. 

"Furniture-moving is not my vocation!" answered Keenan, folding hisarms. 

As Durkin sprang forward, there was no mistaking his meaning. 

"I'll count ten, " he said, white-lipped. "Unless the table goes out, _you_ go out!" And he began counting, silently, numeral by numeral. 

"Well, if you insist!" said Keenan, with a shrug. 

Even as Keenan, at the menace of his reiterated command to hurry, threwopen the guard door, Durkin was wondering, in his feverish activity ofmind, just how soon MacNutt's next move would come, and just how andwhere he would strike. 

The answer to that question came more quickly than he had expected. And it came grimly, and in a manner most unlooked for. 

For even as the reluctant Keenan stooped over the heavy table, not tenfeet from the shaft, the elevator cage descended. It flashed by theopen door without stopping on its hurried course. But as it wingedpast that square of open light a revolver shot rang out and reëchoedthrough the room. 

Durkin, peering across the curling smoke, saw Keenan pitch forward onhis hands, struggle and thrash to his feet once more, like a woundedrabbit. Then he fell again, prone on his face, close beside the shaftdoor. There he lay, breathing in little gurgles. 

Durkin, with little beads of sweat on his pallid face, realized what itmeant. That flying shot had been intended for _him_. MacNutt, in thatdesperate and hurried and unreasoning last chance, had delivered hisblow, but had been mistaken in his man!

This knowledge flashed through his mind with the rapidity of akinetoscope plate, and a moment later was obliterated by still anotherhurrying impression. For, through the deserted house rang two shortand terrified screams, high-pitched and piercing. They were a woman'sscreams, and he knew they could come from no one but Frank. 

He turned and hurled himself down the stairway, without even waiting torecover the revolver that had fallen a minute before from his startledfingers. He was conscious only of flinging the weight of his slidingbody on the flume-like surface of the smooth balustrade, with his feetclattering on the polished steps as he went. He turned and dashed onto the head of the next stairway, and in the same manner flung himselfto the floor beneath, and then to the next, and the next, until he wasin the gloom of the basement itself. 

Breathless and panting, he groped his way through the darkness, towhere a glimmer of light came from what he hurriedly took to be theengine-room. 

There, as he darted through the narrow doorway, into the circle of dimlight from the one tinted globe in the lowered elevator cage, a strangesight met his eyes. It shocked and flung him into a second or two ofblank indecision, of volitionless and thoughtless inactivity. For onemoment of ominous calm it smote and held him there, before the suddenblind, cyclonic rush of brain and body which the vision gave rise to. 

For at the door of the open cage MacNutt and Frank fought and struggledand panted together. The man was inside, on the bottom of the cage, the woman was outside it. Her huddled but still resisting body waslocked and jammed halfway across the narrow door. One of heropponent's great, ape-like strangling arms was about her neck. But thefingers at the end of it were caught between her strong whitecarnivorous teeth; and they became stained with blood as, in herfrenzy, she fought and bit and struggled, with the blind fury of somefinal despair. Her revolver she had been unable to use; it lay out ofher reach, behind them on the floor of the cage. 

MacNutt, as he strained and tore at her resisting body, was fightingand edging his way with her back into the cage, to where that waitingrevolver lay. He himself was already well within the narrow opening, sprawled out red and disheveled and Titanesque on the cage floor. Butshe was resisting him, inch by inch, fighting desperately, like acornered cat, for her very life, yet knowing there could be only oneend to that uneven conflict. 

Durkin, after one comprehending glance, followed his first animalimpulse of offense, and descended on MacNutt, beating at the prone, bull-like head, with its claret-colored bald spot, across which ran onelivid scratch. He pounded on the clustered fingers of the gorilla-likehand, crushing and bruising them against the gilded iron grill-work, through which was interwoven the Penfield triple crescent. 

The clutching arms relaxed, but only for a moment. In that moment, however, Durkin had stooped and with the one hand that remained withhim to use, struggled to tear Frank away from the deadly clutch. Thishe would surely have done had not MacNutt seen his chance, and with hisfree hand suddenly caught at the wounded wrist that hung stained andlimp at his enemy's side. That sudden, savage torture of the laceratedflesh was more than the weak and exhausted body of Durkin could endure. He emitted one little involuntary cry; then every protesting nerve andsinew capitulated, a white light seemed to flash and burn at the baseof his very brain, and then go out. He fell fainting on the hard maplefloor. 

For a moment or two, like a defeated prize-fighter, he panted andstruggled, ludicrously yet pathetically, to rise to his feet, but theeffort was futile. 

It was as he found himself ebbing down through some soft and featheryemptiness that he seemed to hear a pitiful and imploring voice callthinly out, "_Mack_!" Still fainter he seemed to hear it, "_Mack_!_Come up_! _I'm dying_!" He remembered, lazily, that it sounded likethe distant voice of Keenan--but where was Keenan?

Then he seemed to hear the purr and murmur of distant machinery, followed by a gentle puff of sound and what he hazily dreamed was thesmell of powder smoke. Then he remembered no more. 

 * * * * * *

Just how or at what juncture he lost consciousness he could neverclearly remember. But his first tangible impression was the knowledgethat his wife was once more pouring brandy down his throat andimploring him to hurry. Then the sound of muffled blows echoed fromabove. 

"Quick, Jim, oh, quick, or it will be too late. No, not that way. Wecan't go by the front--that's cut off. By the back--this way--I've goteverything open!"

"But what's the noise?" asked Durkin weakly. 

"That's the police, with a fireman's axe, breaking in the front door. But, see, it's not too late! These steps take us up to the back court, and this iron gate opens on a lane that runs from the supply departmentof the hotel there, right through to the open street!"

He shambled after her, white and tottering. 

"Quick, Jim, quick!" she reiterated, as she supported him through thelow gate, and kept her arm in his as they passed down the dark lane, with its homely smells of early cookery and baking bread. Only onepassion possessed them--the blind and persistent and unreasoningpassion for escape, for freedom. 

"But MacNutt--where's MacNutt?" demanded Durkin, coming to a stop. 

"No--no--quick!" gasped Frank, tugging at his arm. 

"I tell you I've got to have it out with that man!" protested thepitiably dazed but dogged combatant at her side. 

"You can't, Jim!"

"But I've got to!"

"You can't--you can't, " she moaned, "for he's dead!"

A sudden sickening fear crept through his aching bones, seeming toleave them fluid, like wax. 

"You--you did it?" he asked unsteadily. The face he gazed into lookedaged and worn and pallid in the dim half-light of the breaking morning. A sudden great pity for her tore at his heart. 

"No, " she cried fiercely. "No--not me!"

But she was still tugging insanely at his obdurate arm. "I tell you, Jim, you must hurry, or it will be too late!"

"Thank God!" he gasped, scarcely hearing her pleadings. 

They were skirting three early delivery-wagons, waiting to unload atthe supply door of the hotel. A boy passing in the street beyond wasshrilly whistling "Tammany. "

"Tell me--now!" demanded Durkin. 

"When you fainted MacNutt reached back for the revolver. He would haveshot you, only Keenan called for him. He cried down the shaft that hewas dying. He--he must have pushed the button as he fell. MacNutt wasstill on the floor of the cage, leaning out to take aim at us. Thenthe steel of the shaft-door and the steel of the elevator cage as itwent up came to--oh--I _can't_ tell you now!"

Durkin came to a stop, swaying against her. 

"You mean the cage worked automatically, that it went up, with MacNuttstill leaning out?"

"Yes!" gasped the woman brokenly; and Durkin felt the shiver of thetortured body on which he leaned. 

He was silent as they swung into the open street. His exhausted anduncoördinating brain was idly busy with some vague impression of thepoignant irony of that end, of how that uncomprehending yet ineluctablepower with which this man had toyed and played and sinned had, at theultimate moment, established its authority and exacted its right. 

He pulled himself up with a fluttering gasp, weak, sick, overcome, andwas wordlessly grateful for the sustaining arm at his side. 

For, once in the open, they were walking eastward, without a sense, momentarily, of either direction or destination. 

Above the valley of the mist-hung street a thin and yellow light showedwhere morning was coming on, tardily, thickly. The boy whistling"Tammany" passed out of hearing. 

"Thank God! oh, thank God!" Frank suddenly sobbed out, tossed andexalted on a wave of blind gratitude. 

"God?" moaned the defeated and unhappy man at her side, draggingpainfully on with his bruised and bitter body. "What has God to dowith all this--or with us?"

She could not answer. She saw only a wide and gloomy vista of tangledcrime and offense, stretching back into the past, as the tumbled andhuddled waves of a sea run out to its crowding skyline. But it was thesea that had delivered them. 

Broken, frustrated and defeated, hunted and homeless, withoutconsolation for her Yesterday or respect for her Today, she looked upat the slowly wakening morning with a feeling that seemed to fuse andblend into the fiercest of joy. 

Then the momentary exaltation died out of her weary body. They hadlife--but life was not enough! A sense of something within her fallingand crumbling away, a silence of dark questioning and indecision, tookpossession of her. 

Then out of her misery she cried still again, passionately, persistently, as she clutched and clung to him, her mate for whom andwith him she was once destined to be a wanderer over the face of theearth:

"There must be a God! I tell you, there _must_ be a God. He has letus escape!"

The man looked at her, questioningly. 

"Don't you understand? This is the last?"

"The last?"

"Yes--yes, the last! You said it would be never again, if once youescaped from this!"

He had forgotten. But the woman at his side, holding him up, hadremembered. 

"Come!" she said. And they went on again. 

CHAPTER XXX

ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE

Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the rowof pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to thegloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the toweringoffice-buildings on either side of it. There was a touch of autumn inthe air, and a black frost of the night before had left the sidewalkscarpeted with the mottled roans and yellows and russets of the fallenleaves. 

Summer was over and gone. And all life, in some way, seemed to have agedwith the ageing of the year. There was something mournful, to the earsof the waiting woman, in the very rustle of the dry leaves under herfeet, as she paced the Square. The sight of the half-strippedtree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thoughtof skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. Theyseemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability ofall things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to liveand exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creepingchanges and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her!"I hate autumn, most awfully, " she had confessed to her husband thatmorning, dolefully. 

She went on, passing from under the shadow of the trees, grateful for thereassuring thin sunshine of the late afternoon, that touched the roofsand the tree-tops with gilt, and bathed the more toweringoffice-buildings in a brazen glory of light, and left the street-dustswimming in a vapor of pale gold. The city noises seemed muffled andquiescent. A sense of fulfillment, of pensive maturity, of tranquillityafter tumult, lay over even the urban world before her. She scarcelyknew why or how it was, but it left her melancholy, lonely, homesick forthings she could not name. 

The waiting woman looked up, and saw her husband. Suddenly, with onedeep breath, all the emptiness of life was a thing, if not of the past, at least of the background of consciousness. 

He was quite close to her by this time, and as she stood there, waiting, she swept him with her quick and searching gaze. He appeared before her, in that fleeting moment of impersonal vision, strangely objective, ascompletely and acutely visualized as though she had looked upon him forthe first time. 

Something in his face wrung her heart, foolishly, something in thewordless, Rembrandt-like poignancy with which it stood out, through thecold autumn sunlight of the late afternoon, in its mortal isolation ofsoul, its sense of being detached and denied the companionship of itskind. He looked old and tired. He, too, was voyaging towards somemelancholy autumnal maturity, some sorrowful denudation of youth, thatleft him pitiful to her impotently aching heart. He, too, stood in wantof some greater love than even she could ever bring to him, as surely asshe still cried out for the solace of some companionship, not closer thanhis, but of a different fiber. She had found herself, of late, vaguelyhungering for some influence less autumnal, less vesper-like, to hold andwall her back from those grayer hours of retrospection which crept intoher life. Yet this was a secret she had kept always locked in her ownholy of holies. For even in the face of that indeterminate feeling, itstill stabbed her like a knife to think of any thought or life comingbetween her and her husband. 

She hurried to him, with her habitual little throaty cry, and caught hisarm in hers. The gesture was almost a passionate one. 

"Jim, you're working too hard!" she said, as they went on again, arm inarm. 

He studied her upturned face. The pale oval under the great heavy crownof glinting chestnut seemed paler than usual, the violet eyes seemed moreshadowy. There clung to her a puzzling and unfamiliar sense of fragility. 

"What is it?" he asked, coming to a stop. 

"I'm worried about _you_!" she cried. "This is the fourth, almost thefifth month, you've shut yourself up with that transmitter!"

"But it's _work_!" he answered, unmoved. 

"Yes, I know, but work without a holiday, without rest----"

"But think what it's going to be to us! All I've got to do now is to getmy selenium cell simplified enough for commercial purposes! And anothermonth will do it!"

"But eight months ago you said that!"

"There's nothing left to stick us _now_. Once I get this cell the way Iwant it, we'll start manufacturing, for all we're worth. In less thansix months we'll be filling contracts here in America. Two months laterwe'll be introducing into seven different countries in Europe a fullyprotected and patented transmitting camera as far ahead of theold-fashioned photophone as a Bell telephone is ahead of a tinspeaking-tube. "

"I know, Jim; but you must be more careful! You must, in some way, stopworking so hard!"

"Who could help it, at this sort of work?" he protested, contentedly. She felt that he, too, had stumbled upon that timeless and mysteriousparadox of existence, that incongruous law which ordains that as onesurrenders and relinquishes and gives, so one shall live the richer anddeeper. 

"I tell you, Frank, " her husband was saying, "the more I know ofelectricity the more I bow down before it, in wonder, the prouder I am tobe mixed up in its mysteries! Just think of what it's come to be, thisthing we call Electricity, since the day primitive man first rubbed apiece of amber and beheld the puny miracle of magnetic attraction! Why, today it harnesses tides and waterfalls, and tames and orders force, andleaves power docile and patient, swinging meek and ready from a bit ofmetal thread! It lightens cities, at a turn of the wrist; it hurls yourvoice half way round the world, it guides sailors and measures and weighsthe stars; it threads empires together with its humming wires; it's theshuttle that's woven all civilization into one compact fabric! It's thelight of our night-time, and the civilizer of our world. It explodesmines, and heals sickness. It creeps as silent as death through athousand miles of sea, and yet it's the very tongue of our world! Itprints and carves and beautifies; it rises to the most stupendous tasks, and then it stoops to the most delicate work!"

"And it lets me ring you up, my beloved own, and hear your voice, yourliving voice!" Even beyond her laughter he could catch the rapt note asshe spoke. He responded to that note by catching at her gloved hand, andkeeping it in his gratefully. 

"Yes, but it does even more than annihilate space and turn wheels anddespatch trains. Think what it's doing with wireless alone! And _that_is only the beginning! Why, the whole world is alive and athrob withenergy, with stored-up power aching to be used--and some day it will beelectricity that will teach all nature how to work and toil for man! Asyet we don't even know what it is! It's formless, to us, bodiless, invisible, imponderable! It's still unknown--as unknown as God!--andalmost as mysterious!"

"Oh!" she reproved. 

"I've sometimes wondered if those lightning flashes and those terrifyingthings that used to fill the temples in the Eleusinian Mysteries didn'tsimply mean that those old priests of Apollo knew more about electriccurrents than we imagine. "

"And even Jove's bolts were only electricity, weren't they?" sheassented. "So you're right, in a way--their god and their power _were_electricity! Perhaps it was electricity Prometheus stole!"

"No, it's older than Prometheus, it's older than Adam, it's mixed up insome way with the very origin of life itself! It's the most mysteriousthing in the world--and the most beautiful!" he concluded, with solemnconviction. 

They walked on in silence for a moment or two. A dead leaf fell anddrifted between them. The afternoon deepened into twilight. 

"O, Jim, not the most beautiful!" said Frank, suddenly, thrilled andshaken with some wayward passion of gratitude, as acute as it wasunheralded. 

He looked down at her, puzzled. 

"Oh, I'm glad, Jim; glad!" she cried, irrelevantly. 

"Glad for what?"

"For this--for you--for everything!"

His face clouded a little, for a moment, with the shadow of the past thatcould and would not be altogether past. 

"I thought we'd decided to let that--stay closed?" he said. There was anote of reproof in his voice. 

"Do you know what _I_ think is the most beautiful thing in all the world, Jim?" she went on, as irrelevantly as before, but holding his arm stillmore tightly entangled in hers. "I think it's Redemption!"

"Redemption?"

"Yes--I think there's nothing ever done, or made, or written of, or sungof by poets, more beautiful than a soul, a poor, unhappy human soul, coming into its own once more! Oh, I don't believe I can ever make youfeel it as I feel it--but I don't believe there's an adventure or amovement in all life more beautiful than the rehabilitation--that's theonly word I can use!--of a man's heart, or a woman's! Think of it, Jim!--what can be lovelier than the restoration of sanity and beauty andmeaning to a suffering and tortured life? Health after sickness islovely, and so is healing after disease, and quietness after unrest, andpeace after struggle. But that, Jim, is only for the body. It's onlyfor something of a day or two, or a year or two. When a soul isredeemed, it's something that leaves you face to face with--withEternity!"

Again he studied her rapt and mournful eyes, at sea, wondering to whatnew turn the sacrificial instinct of her sex was leading her. 

"What has made you think of all this?" he demanded of her, a littleunhappily, a little afraid of the old wounds that were healing so slowly. "Why should you remind me of how hard it is, and how little I've beenable to do?"

She was silent for several minutes again, as they walked on, slowly, under the spectral autumn trees, with the rustling dead leaves at theirfeet. She found it hard to answer him. 

"'The saints are only the sinners who kept on trying!'" she quoted tohim, for the second time in their lives. Then she came to a full stop. 

"Oh, Jim, I need you so much, now!" she cried out, at last, pitifully, and still again he could not bridge the abyss that lay between onethought and another. 

"Need me?"

"Yes, need you!"

Again a dead leaf fluttered and drifted between them. 

"What is it?" he asked, more gently. 

She put her hand on his shoulder, and when she spoke her voice was littlemore than a whisper. 

And he, the man who had spoken of trivial mysteries, bowed before thatsupremest mystery which broods and centres in the thought of motherhood. 

"We'll have to be good now--terribly good!" she wailed. And she tried tolaugh up at him, with a touch of her old bravery, in a futile effort tomake light of her tears. 

"30"