URKIN sat at the café table, smoking, his watch in his hand. It was already seven minutes to four. As the seventh minute slipped into the sixth, and the sixth into the fifth, some first, vague sense of impending disaster stole over him.
“Is this seat taken, sir?”
It was a waiter speaking, with a short, florid man at his heels.
“Yes,” said Durkin, quietly, “I'm expecting a lady—in five minutes.”
The florid man bowed. The waiter said “Yes, sir,” tipped the chair against the table edge, and went on in search of a seat.
Durkin smoked hard once more, relishing the irony of it all. He did not, naturally enough, explain that the lady he was expecting had made the engagement two thousand miles away from the table at which he sat and at which he was to meet her precisely on the stroke of four. Such things were theatrical, and unnecessary; besides, one had to allow for accidents. And once more, with a puzzled brow, he took up his paper and looked through the Teutonic's passenger-list, still involuntarily cast down by a wayward sense of possible calamity.
He imagined some dark coalition of forces against him, obscurely depressed for the moment, by the shadow of some immense, seemingly impassive, and yet implacable, animosity of eternal rule toward the accidental revolter. The same vague feeling had possessed him the day he first abandoned his operator's key and became an “overhead guerrilla.” Still later it had come to him, when, dazzled by the splendor of a vast hazard, he joined forces with the notorious MacNutt and became a professional wire-tapper, so audaciously and yet so cautiously bleeding Penfield's pool-rooms, in the very teeth of Inspector Doogan and his men. Still, he argued with himself, that had been a victory of intelligence—and would not victory always be with the alerter mind and the warier hand? Would they not still meet and combat, point by point, this vague and mysterious enemy whose emissaries, even though relentless, were always so temptingly dull?
A woman, dressed in black, with a dark veil caught up around the rim of her hat, pushed her way through the crowded café toward the table in the corner. She might have passed for a mere girl, but for the heavy shadows about the weary-looking, violet eyes and the betraying fullness of her womanly breast and hips. She glanced at the clock, and smiled a little, with her calm, almost pensive lips, as she placed a pearl-gloved hand on the back of the tilted chair.
“I am on time, you see,” she said, quietly, in her soft contralto, as she sank into the chair with a contented sigh, and began drawing off her gloves. “It is precisely four o'clock.”
“Why, Mame!” cried Durkin, with eloquent enough inadequacy, his face paling a little, for all his assumption of easy fortitude. He continued to look at her, a sudden lump in his throat choking back the hundred stampeding words that seemed clamoring to escape. For one wavering moment she let her eyes lose their studied calmness, and, inwardly surrendering, gazed at him recklessly, abandonedly, with her very soul in her face.
“Dearest!” she whispered to him, with her back to the crowded room.
He tried to seize her ungloved hand in his, but she drew him up with a sudden monitory “Hsssh!” Then he, too, remembered, and they took up their rôle again.
“Now, you want, I know, a good silver fizz, and I want a nice, old-fashioned, warm milk-punch. For, oh, Jim, I'm tired right out!”
Durkin called his waiter and gave him the order, puffing his cigar with assumed insolence of 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, “there's trouble ahead!”
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 a new and different interest.
“You don't mean Doogan's men?”
“Not so loud, dear! No, not Doogan's men. It's nothing like that. But first tell me, quickly, has anything gone wrong over here?”
“Not a thing—except that you were away.”
“But hasn't anything happened since I saw you?”
“Nothing worth while. It's been so dull, so deadly dull, I almost jumped back into the old game, and held up a pool-room or two. Five whole weeks of—of just waiting for you!”