“Yes, I mean it!”
He looked at her colorless face closely. Something in it seemed to satisfy him.
“But how am I to know you’re going to stick to your bargain?” he still hesitated. “How am I to be sure you won’t get your price and then give me the slip?”
“Would Durkin want me, after that? Would he take up with me when you had finished with me? Oh, he’s not that make of man!” she scoffed in her hard, dry voice. There was a little silence; then, “Is that all?” she asked in her dead voice.
“That’s just as you say,” he answered.
“Very well,” she said between her drawn lips. She stepped quickly to the back of the room, and lifting the hidden telephone transmitter up on the table she threw open the window to loop the wire that ran by the overhanging eave.
“Hold on, there!” cried MacNutt, in alarm. “What’s all this, anyway?”
“I have got to tell Durkin, that’s all. He has got to know, of course, what we have decided on.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, my beauty! If there’s goin’ to be any telephonin’ out o’ this house, I do it myself!”
“It makes no difference,” she answered, apathetically. “You can tell him as well as I could.”