“Yes, and I mean to,” he declared, determinedly, turning with her to look at the gathering twilight of the city, and then lapsing into awkward silence once more.
CHAPTER III
More than once, during the feverish, kaleidoscopic days that followed, Durkin found himself drawing aside to ask if, after all, he were not living some restless dream in which all things hung tenuous and insubstantial. The fine linen and luxury of life were so new to him that in itself it half intoxicated; yet, outside the mere ventral pleasures of existence, with its good dinners in quiet cafés of gold and glass and muffling carpets, its visits to rustling, dimly-lighted theatres, its drives about the open city, its ever-mingled odors of Havana and cut flowers,—there was the keener and more penetrating happiness of listening to the soft English voice of what seemed to him a bewilderingly beautiful woman.
She was that, at least to him; and Durkin was content to let the world think what it liked. He found work to be done, it is true,—rigorous and exacting work while it lasted, when the appointed days for holding up Penfield’s despatches came around. But the danger of it all, for some reason, never entered his mind, as he sat over his instrument, reading off the horses to the woman at his side, who, in turn, repeated them over the telephones, in cipher, to MacNutt and Mackenzie; and then, when the time allowance had elapsed, cutting in once more and sending on the intercepted despatches, even imitating to a nicety the slip-shod erratic volubility of Corcoran’s “blind send.”
Once only did a disturbing incident tend to ruffle the quiet waters of Durkin’s strange contentment. It was one afternoon when Mackenzie had been sent in to make a report, and had noticed certain things to which he did not take kindly, Durkin thought.
“I’m not saying anything,” he blurted out, when they were alone, “but don’t you let that woman make a fool of you!”
“You shut up about that woman!” retorted Durkin, hotly. Then, imagining he saw some second and deeper meaning in the other’s words, he caught him by the lapel of the vest, and held him against the wall.
“You are saying something, you hound! What do you mean by that, anyway?” he cried, with a white face. The man against the wall could see that a word would bring the onslaught, but he was used to trouble of that sort, and many a keener menace. So he only laughed contemptuously, with his shoulders up, as he pulled the other’s fingers from his throat.
“You damned lobster, you!” he said, going off on the safer tack of amiable profanity. Then feeling himself free once more, his old bitter audacity proclaimed itself.
“You fool, you, don’t you know that woman’s been—”