“There it is,” she said, with shaking hands and quivering lips, flashing at him a look in which he could see hatred, contempt, self-disgust and infinite unhappiness.
“There it is!” she called out to him, shrilly. “There it is—all you wanted, at last, and I hope it will make you happy!”
She tore the veil she had dragged from her head between her two distraught hands and flung it from her, and then fell in the other’s arms and wept on his shoulder like a tired child, convulsively, bitterly, hopelessly.
CHAPTER XXIII
“Helen can not possibly sail tomorrow.”
This was the cipher message which flashed from Samuel Curry to his New Orleans partner, giving him hurried warning that the final movement in their cotton coup had been again postponed for at least another twenty-four hours. Frances Candler, keeping watch on the up-town wires, had caught the first inkling of this relieving news. After a passionate hour of talk and pleading from Durkin, and after twelve long hours of unbroken sleep, much of her spirit of rebelliousness had passed away, and she had unwillingly and listlessly taken up the threads of what seemed to her a sadly tangled duty once more.
But with the advent of Curry’s climactic message her old, more intimate interest in the game gradually awoke. By daylight she had sent word down to Durkin, who, about that time, was having quite trouble enough of his own.
For his underground guerrilla work, as it was called, had its risks in even the remoter parts of the city. But here, in the Wall Street district, by day the most carefully guarded area of all New York, just as by night the Tenderloin is the most watched—here, with hundreds hourly passing to and fro and Central Office men buzzing back and forth, Durkin knew there were unusual perils, and need for unusual care.
Yet early that morning, under the very eyes of a patrolman, he had casually and hummingly entered the Postal-Union conduit, by way of the manhole not sixty yards from Broadway itself. In his hands he carried his instruments and a bag of tools, and he nodded with businesslike geniality as the patrolman stepped over toward him.
“Got a guard to stand over this manhole?” demanded the officer.