And again she looked at him, across the quiet but abysmal gulf of her reawakening despair.
“But there is just where we make ourselves so unhappy—we’re so afraid about being afraid! Life without some fear—what is it?”
“Oh, I am without defence!” she lamented, indeterminately and inconsequently. She sighed again, and still again gazed into his face with her shadowy and unhappy and seemingly hungry eyes. Then, with a sudden abandoning uptoss of her reckless hands, that seemed to fling both solemnity and memory from her, she laughingly declared that it was already too late to cry over spilt milk. Yet the sound of her careless laughter fell, in some way, more lugubriously on Durkin’s ear than had all her earlier lamentation.
“But _why_ did you ever write that first letter?” he persisted.
She knew she could not explain, satisfactorily. “It was the result of being lonesome, let’s say, and perhaps being morbid, after my illness!”
Durkin called the waiter and gave him an order, puffing his cigar with assumed unconcern, while the woman murmured across the table to him: “You look quite foreign, with that magnificent Vandyke! And, by the way, how do you like my English bang?”
“Why, it’s dyed!” said Durkin, for the first time missing the sunny glint in the familiar crown of chestnut.
“Jim,” said the woman, in lower tones, sobering again, “there’s trouble ahead, already!”
She drew her chair a little closer, and leaned forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. Durkin lighted another cigar, and lounged toward her with the same careless pose, his face alert with new and different interest.
“Not so loud, dear! No, not Doogan’s men, either. It’s nothing like that. But tell me, quickly, has anything gone wrong over here?”
“But hasn’t _anything_ happened since I saw you?”
“Nothing worth while—no. It’s been so dull, so deadly dull, I all but jumped back into the old game and held up a Charleston pool-room or two! Five whole weeks of—of just waiting for you!”
She caught up her veil, where a part of it dropped down from her hat-rim, and smiled her wistfully girlish smile at him. Then she glanced carefully about her; no one seemed within earshot.
“Yes, I know. It seemed just as long to me, dearest. Only, because of several things, _I_ had to jump into something. That’s what I must tell you about—but we can’t talk here.”