His fingers were toying nervously with a little magnetic “wire finder.”
“How in heavens did you ever get mixed up with—with—in this sort of thing?” Durkin at last demanded, exasperated into the immediate question. He turned on her quickly, as he asked it, and the eyes of the two met, combatively, for a moment or two. It was the girl who at last looked away.
“How did you?” she asked, quietly enough. She was strangely unlike any woman bookie he had seen or heard of before.
“Oh, me,—I’m different!” he cried, deprecatively. For some subtle reason she went pale, and then flushed hot again.
“You’re—you’re not MacNutt’s wife?” he asked her, almost hopelessly.
She moved her head from side to side, slowly, in dissent, and got up and went to the window, where she gazed out over the house-tops at the paling afternoon.
“No, I’m not his wife,” she said, in her quiet contralto.
“Then why won’t you tell me how you got mixed up in this sort of thing?”
“It’s all so silly and so commonplace,” she said, without turning to look at him.
“Yes?” he said, and waited.