"Then why can't I prepare the ground for the New York situation, whatever it may be?" she demanded.
"You mean by standing pat with Keenan?"
"Precisely."
"Then how will you begin?"
"By sending him a note at once, telling him how I slipped away from Genoa to Venice, and asking him the meaning of the Pobloff attack—in other words, by appearing so actively suspicious of him that he'll forget to be suspicious of me."
"And what do you imagine he will answer?"
"I think he will send me back word to say absolutely nothing about the Genoa episode—he may even claim that it's quite beyond his comprehension. That will give us a chance to meet more naturally, and then we can talk things over more minutely, at our leisure."
Durkin wheeled on her, half-angrily. Through all their career, he had remained strangely unschooled to any such concession as this. It was an affront to his dormant and masculine spirit of guardianship; it seemed a blow in the teeth of his nurturing instinct, an overriding of his prerogatives of a man and a husband.
"While you're making love to him on the bridge-deck, on moonlight nights!" he flung back at her, bitterly.
"Do you think I could?" she murmured, with a ghost of a sigh.