It was a waiter speaking, with a short, florid man at his heels.
“Yes,” said Durkin, quietly, “I’m expecting a lady—in five minutes.”
The florid man bowed. The waiter said “Yes, sir,” tipped the chair against the table edge, and went on in search of a seat.
Durkin smoked hard once more, relishing the touch of irony in it all. He did not, naturally enough, explain that the lady he was expecting had made the engagement three thousand miles away from the table at which he sat and at which he was to meet her precisely on the stroke of four. Such things were theatrical, and unnecessary; besides, one had to allow for accidents. And once more, with a puzzled brow, he took up his paper and looked through the Majestic’s passenger list, still involuntarily cast down by a wayward sense of possible calamity.
He imagined some dark coalition of forces against him, obscurely depressed, for the moment, by the shadow of some immense, seemingly impassive, and yet implacable animosity of eternal rule toward the accidental revolter. The same vague feeling had possessed him that infelicitously happy day when, after abandoning his operator’s key, he had become an “overhead guerrilla.” Still later it had come to him, from time to time, as, dazzled by the splendor of that vast hazard which had ended in such disastrous triumph, he had revolted against MacNutt, and preyed on the preyer himself. He had begun to feel, and he had felt, from that time forward, that he was existing under a series of conditions other than those of the men about him. He was no longer one of them. He was out of the fold. He carried the taint of the pariah. He was, henceforth, however he might try, as Frances Candler had warned him, to muffle or forget it, a social anomaly.
To the consciousness of this he applied his customary balm, which lay in the thought that now the older creeds and ethics of life had crumbled away. The spirit which dominated America today, he felt, was that of the business man’s code of morals; it was the test, not of right, but of might, as it flowered in intelligence and craftiness. And that first dubious victory, of his own, he argued with himself, had been one of intelligence—should not victory, then, always be with the alerter head and the warier hand? And this vague and mysterious enemy whose emissaries, even though relentless, were always so temptingly dull—would they not always meet and clash, and the battle be to the strong?
A woman, dressed in black, with a dark veil caught up around the rim of her hat, pushed her way through the crowded restaurant toward the table in the corner. She might have passed for a mere girl, but for the heavy shadows about the weary-looking, violet eyes and the betraying fullness of her soberly gowned figure. She glanced at the clock, and smiled a little, with her calm, almost pensive lips, as she placed a pearl-gloved hand on the back of the tilted chair.
“I am on time, you see,” she said, quietly in her soft contralto, as she sank into the chair with a contented sigh, and began drawing off her gloves. “It is precisely four o’clock.”
Outwardly she appeared at ease, well-poised and unruffled. Only the quick rise and fall of her bosom and the tremulousness of her hands gave any sign of her inner agitation.
“Why—Frank!” cried Durkin, with eloquent enough inadequacy, his face paling a little, for all his own assumption of easy fortitude. He continued to look at her, a sudden lump in his throat choking back the hundred stampeding words that seemed clamoring to escape. He noticed, as he had so often noticed before, how rapid and easy were her movements, and how, through all her softness, she impressed one with a sense of her great muscular agility.