Durkin laughed contentedly, for his eyes had just been following the line of the woman’s profile.
“Remember,” continued MacNutt, crisply, “I want you two to do the swell restaurants—in reason, of course, in reason!—and drive round a good deal, and haunt the Avenue a bit, and push through the Waldorf-Astoria every day or two, and drop in at Penfield’s lower house whenever you get word from me. You’d better do the theatres now and then, too—I want you to be seen, remember,—but always together! It may be kind o’ hard, not bein’ able to pick your friend, Durkin, but Frank knows the ropes, and how much not to spend, and what to fight shy of, and who to steer clear of—and I guess she can explain things as you go along.”
He turned back once more, from the doorway.
“Now, remember,—don’t answer that ’phone unless Mack or me gives the three-four ring! If she rings all night, don’t answer! And ‘Battery Park,’ mind, means trouble. When you’re tipped off with that, get the stuff in the safe, if you can, before you break away. That’s all, I guess, for now!” And he joined the man called Mack in the hall, and together they hurried downstairs, and let themselves out, leaving Durkin and his quiet-eyed colleague alone.
He sat and looked at her, dazed, bewildered, still teased by the veil of unreality which seemed to sway between him and the world about him. It seemed to him as though he were watching a hurrying, shifting drama from a distance,—watching it as, in his early days in New York, he used to watch the Broadway performances from his cramped little gallery seat.
“Am I awake?” he asked weakly.
Then he laughed recklessly, and turned to her once more, abstractedly rubbing his stubbled chin, and remembering to his sudden shame that he had gone unshaved for half a week. Now that MacNutt was away he hoped to see her in her true light. Some mere word or posture, he thought, would brush the entire enigma away.
“Am I awake?” he repeated, pushing his hand up through his hair. He was still watching her for some betraying touch of brazenness. He could be more at ease with her, he felt, when once she had reconciled herself with her uncouth surroundings, through the accidental but inevitable touch of vulgarity which was to establish what she really was.
“Yes; it is all very real!” she laughed quietly, but restrainedly. For the second time he noticed her white, regular teeth, as she hurried about, straightening up the belittered room.
During his narrow and busy life Durkin had known few women; never before had he known a woman like this one, with whom destiny had so strangely ordained that he should talk and drive and idle, work and watch and plot. He looked once more at her thick, tumbled chestnut hair, at the soft pallor of her oval cheek, and the well-gowned figure, as she stooped over a condenser,—wondering within himself how it would all end, and what was the meaning of it.