"Hello, there, Frank!—I've been looking out for you!" said the intruder, with a taunt of mockery in his easy laugh.
It was MacNutt. She gaped at him stupidly, with an inarticulate throaty gasp, half of protest, half of bewilderment.
"You see, I know you, Frank, and Keenan doesn't!" And again she felt the sting of his scoffing laughter.
She looked at the subdolous, pale-green eyes, with their predatory restlessness, at the square-blocked, flaccid jaw, and the beefy, animal-like massiveness of the strong neck, at the huge form odorous of gin and cigar smoke, and the great, hairy hands marked with their purplish veinings. It seemed like a ghost out of some long-past and only half-remembered life. It came back to her with all the hideousness of a momentarily forgotten nightmare, made newly hideous by the sanities of ordered design and open daylight in which it intruded. And her heart sank and hope burned out of her.
"You! How dare you come here?" she demanded, with a show of hot defiance.
He looked at her collectedly and studiously, with an approving little side-shake of the bull-dog, pugnacious-looking head.
"You're the same fine looker!" was all he said, with an appreciative clucking of the throat. Oh, how she hated him, and everything for which he stood!
By this time they had threaded their way out of the tangled traffic of West street, and were rumbling cityward through the narrower streets of Greenwich village.
Frank's first intelligible feeling was one of gratitude at the thought that Durkin had escaped the trap into which she herself had fallen. That did not leave the situation quite so hopeless. Her second feeling was one of fear that he might be following her, then one that he might not, that he would not be near her in the coming moment of need—for she knew that now of all times MacNutt held her in the hollow of his hand—that now, as never before, he would frustrate and crush and obliterate her. There were old transgressions to be paid for; there were old scores to be wiped out. Keenan and his Penfield wealth were nothing to her now—she was no longer plotting for the future, but shrinking away from her dark and toppling present, that seemed about to buckle like a falling wall and crush her as it fell. Month after month, in Europe, she had known visions of some such meeting as this, through nightmare and troubled sleep. And now it was upon her.
MacNutt seemed to follow her line of flashing thought, for he emitted a short bark of a laugh and said: "It's pretty small, this world, isn't it? I guessed that we'd be meetin' again before I'd swung round the circle!"