“Oh, I am without defence!” she lamented, indeterminately and inconsequently. She sighed again, and still again gazed into his face with her shadowy and unhappy and seemingly hungry eyes. Then, with a sudden abandoning uptoss of her reckless hands, that seemed to fling both solemnity and memory from her, she laughingly declared that it was already too late to cry over spilt milk. Yet the sound of her careless laughter fell, in some way, more lugubriously on Durkin’s ear than had all her earlier lamentation.
“But why did you ever write that first letter?” he persisted.
She knew she could not explain, satisfactorily. “It was the result of being lonesome, let’s say, and perhaps being morbid, after my illness!”
Durkin called the waiter and gave him an order, puffing his cigar with assumed unconcern, while the woman murmured across the table to him: “You look quite foreign, with that magnificent Vandyke! And, by the way, how do you like my English bang?”
“Why, it’s dyed!” said Durkin, for the first time missing the sunny glint in the familiar crown of chestnut.
“Jim,” said the woman, in lower tones, sobering again, “there’s trouble ahead, already!”
She drew her chair a little closer, and leaned forward, with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands. Durkin lighted another cigar, and lounged toward her with the same careless pose, his face alert with new and different interest.
“MacNutt?”
“No, not him, thank heaven!”
“You don’t mean Doogan’s men?”