"Oh, in that case," he answered, "you'll find me very glum and uncongenial. You'll probably be only too glad to leave me alone!"
She nodded her head in meditative assent. Her problem was a difficult one.
"Jim," she said suddenly, "why should we play this waiting and retreating game during the next two weeks? Here we have Keenan on board, with nothing to interfere with our operations. Why can't we work a little harder to win his confidence?"
"We?" asked the other.
"Well, why couldn't I? All along, during those days in Genoa, I had the feeling that he would have believed in me, if some little outside accident had only confirmed his faith in me. We can't tell, of course, just what he found out after that Pobloff affair, or just how he interpreted it, or whether he is as much in the dark as ever. If that is the case, we may stand just where we were before with Keenan!"
"But I thought you wanted to get away from this sort of thing?"
"I do—when the time comes," she evaded, tortured by the thought that she had withheld anything from him. "I do—but are we to let Keenan go, when we have him so close to us?"
"Then go ahead and both capture and captivate him!" said Durkin, with a voice that was gruff only because it was indifferent. Still again he was oppressed by the feeling that she was passing beyond his power.
"But see, Jim—I'm getting so old and ugly!" And again she laughed, with her own show of indifference, though her husband knew, by the wistfulness of her face, that she was struggling to hold back some deeper and stronger current of feeling. So he thrust his hands deep in his pockets, and refused to meet her eyes for a second time.
"I don't see why we should be afraid of either Palermo or Gibraltar," Durkin went on at last, with a half-impatient business-is-business glance about him. "Keenan is alone in this. He has no agents over here, that we know of, and he daren't put anything in the hands of the authorities. He's a runaway, a fugitive with the district-attorney's office after him, and he has to move just as quietly as we do. Mark my words, where he will make his first move, and do anything he's going to do, will be in New York!"