A ripple of relieved laughter ebbed out of the wire.
“Oh, Jim,” sounded the far-away voice in his ear, sighingly. “It seems so good!”
“Where are you?”
“In Washington, at the Arlington office.”
He chuckled a little, as though the accomplishment of the miracle, the annihilation of so many miles of space, was a matter of his own personal triumph.
“Here we’re talking together through three hundred miles of midnight!” he boasted to her.
“Yes, I know; but I wish it wasn’t so far! Did you recognize my voice there?”
“I’d know that voice in—in Hell!” he answered, with a sudden grim but inadequate earnestness. He had hoped to say something fitting and fine, but, as always seemed to happen to him in such moments, his imagination foundered in the turbulence of his emotions.
“You may have to some day, my poor Orpheus!” she was laughing back at him.
But the allusion was lost on Durkin, and he cut in with a curt, “What’s happened?”