Then, with his hand on Durkin's cab door he said, with unfeigned bewilderment: "Say, what's the game of your actress friend, anyway?"
Durkin turned away in disgust, without answering. She was no longer his friend; she was his enemy, his betrayer! He had lived by the sword, and by the sword he should die! He had triumphed through crime, and through crime he was being undone! He had led her into the paths of duplicity; he had taught her wrong-doing and dishonor; and with the very tools he had put in her hand she had cut her way out to liberty, and turned and defeated him!
Then he remembered the scene on the Slavonia, and her passionate cry for him, for his love. In the wake of this came the memory of still earlier scenes and still more passionate cries for what he had so scantily given her.
Then suddenly he smote his knees with his clenched fists, and said aloud:
"It can't be true! It can't be true!"
CHAPTER XIX
THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST
Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself out in an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so often had happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for past misdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling, and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with that hunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing, almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled, the danger into which he had passively permitted his wife to drift.
It was not until after two hours of fierce and troubled thought, however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drove down that man-crowded crevasse where lower Broadway flaunted its Semitic signboards to the world, directly to the Criminal Courts building in Centre street.