§1. "No, sir; she’s gone out," said the servant that answered Luke’s ring at the door of the Forbes house and his inquiry for Betty on the afternoon of his interview with Judge Stein.
"Yes, sir; I think so. I think she’s gone over to Mr. Nicholson’s Hester Street mission."
Luke had frequently met the Rev. Pinkney Nicholson; he liked him. The young clergyman was a friend of both Forbes and Forbes’s daughter. The latter often helped in Nicholson’s slum-missionary work; an attendance at Nicholson’s church of St. Athanasius was the only occupation that brought Forbes and Betty even slightly into touch with the world of the Ruysdaels. With Betty, Luke often went to the Sunday morning services. Indeed, he had recently become a consistent member of the congregation, partly because Betty liked the church and partly because Luke himself admired Nicholson’s simple and forcible eloquence and believed enough in Nicholson’s philanthropy to forgive a ritualism that in itself had only a superficial appeal for him.
"She didn’t say when she would be back?" Luke inquired. Until this moment he had not known how badly he wanted to see her.
"No, sir. By dinner-time, I guess. Would you like to leave any message, Mr. Huber?"
"Only that if she isn’t going out this evening, I’ll call."
Luke had hurried to the Forbes house in Brooklyn as soon as Stein left him, for he knew that Betty was usually at home from three o’clock in the afternoon until five; but the Judge had consumed some time; there was a block in the subway and another block on the surface-line at the subway’s end: Luke had missed Betty. There was nothing to be done but to return to town, where he should have remained in order to be in touch with the new friends that were announcing him as their certain chance for the district-attorneyship.
He considered himself ready for the fight. He knew that Stein, although checked in the engagement at the Thirty-ninth Street apartments, would not be defeated and would resume the offensive from some other quarter at some later date; but Luke looked for no serious oppilation by these secret enemies before the end of the month that he had given them in which to come to terms. He underestimated, in short, both the power and the unencumbered license of his foes. He would not realize the handicap that his grant of a four weeks’ armistice placed on his own movements, he would not believe that his antagonists might violate the truce, and he refused to credit them with the vast influence and free conscience which were at their command.