Still—she had ten thousand dollars in her pocketbook. One could do a great deal with ten thousand dollars. But she dismissed the temptation as quickly as it had come to her. She'd go home and wait the certain arrival of Vandervent's men.
She shrugged, her lips curling in a self-amused smile. She'd been frightened at arrest on a trumped-up charge, while imminent arrest on a charge that would be supported by strong circumstantial evidence was just round the corner. She was a funny person, this Clancy. Little things scared her; big things— But big things scared her, too. For when Mrs. Gerand met her at the door of the lodging-house, after Clancy had survived the perilous journey down Fifth Avenue on the 'bus, the landlady's first words were that a gentleman awaited her. Not until Randall had held her hand a full minute could Clancy realize that it wasn't a detective from the district attorney's office.
[XVII]
Clancy had, on the other occasions on which she had met David Randall, been cool, aloof, mildly flirtatious, fun-making. Even when fear had swayed her and he had guessed at some worry eating at her heart, she had managed to preserve a verbal self-command.
But it was a Clancy whom he had never met before who faced him now. It was an incoherent Clancy, who said brokenly, while his big hand still held hers:
"What a surprise! I expected—I'm glad— What a terrible storm—so much snow—in a few hours— Wasn't it fun—last night?"
Then the incoherence that, from a person who had heretofore been always in complete possession of herself, was all the more charming, vanished. She looked down at her hand, then demurely up at him. With Vandervent's detectives ready to knock upon the front door—it is a peculiar thing that one always thinks of detectives as knocking, never ringing—with ten thousand dollars of venal money in her purse; with flight from the city as her only escape—and that, her common sense told her, a temporary one—from her amazing difficulties; with her career, not merely the moving-picture ambitions but the new one of achieving success with Miss Henderson, vanishing as the snow upon the streets would vanish before the rain and sun; with more trouble than she could cope with, Clancy became demure. She was thoroughly feminine. And a woman regards a man as something to be swayed by her. So Clancy forgot her own troubles for the moment in the pleasing task of making Randall's face redder than it was.
"You like it?" she asked. He didn't understand her. "My hand," she explained.