“It wouldn't work out that way,” said Noel, struggling with his wits. “He's too healthy.”
It seemed to him immediately that the comment was not the right one. It was not even an impersonal fact to himself, an advantage merely to the plot, that the sleeper was unable to object to him and discard him from it, as he had resolved to discard Mrs. Tibbett, but with such brutal energy as the sleeper's face indicated. For it repelled not so much by its present relaxed degradation as by its power, its solidity of flesh, its intolerant self-assertion, the physical vigor of the short bull neck, bulky shoulders, heavy mustache, heavy cheeks and jaw, bluish with the shaving of a thick growth. He was dressed, barring his damp dishevelment, like a well-groomed clubman.
But the lady was looking Noel in the eyes, and her own seemed strangely large, but as if covering a spiritual rather than a physical space, settled in melancholy, full of clouds, moving lights and dusky distances.
“I was waiting for him because he ordered me. I'm so afraid of him,” she said, shrinking with the words. “He likes me to be here and afraid of him.”
“Tell me what I am to do?” he said eagerly.
“I suppose you are not to do anything.”
Noel caught the thread of his fluency. He drew a ten-cent piece from his pocket, tossed it on the table, gestured toward it with one hand and swung the other over the back of his chair with an air of polished recklessness.
“But your case seems desperate to you. Is it more than mine? You have followed this thing about to 'the end of the passage,' and there is my last coin. My luck might change to-morrow. Who knows? Perhaps tonight. I would take it without question and full of hope. Will you experiment with fortune and—and me?”
The dark eyes neither consented nor refused. They looked at him gravely.
“It is a black, cold night. The snow is thick in the air and deep on the street Put it so at the worst, but fortune and wit will go far.”