Harshaw stepped briskly forward, with a curt “Excuse me” to the lobbyist, taking no reproach for leaving him with his mouth open, for it seemed his normal condition.
“Why, judge,” Harshaw exclaimed, with his bluff familiarity, “you look bloomin’!” He was about to stretch out his hand, but desisted, noticing that Gwinnan held his hat in one hand, and leaned upon his stick with the other. He took the judge by the elbow, as he walked a few steps with him. A dim image of the pair paced along in the plate-glass windows, as if their doubles were stalking without in the snow in scenes of which they were unconscious. “I had no idea you were pulling together so fast,” he continued, scanning the face which was almost spectral in its attenuation and pallor, in close contrast to his own fat floridity of countenance, his red lips, his gleaming white teeth, his mane of yellow hair, and his dense yellow beard. His wide, black soft hat stuck on the back of his head accented his high color. “But I declare, it’s worth while for a man to get hit over the head to find out how important he is, and how he is esteemed. I never knew more profound sympathy and indignation than the affair excited. As to myself, I felt it especially, as I had taken so much stock in that rascally client of mine.”
Gwinnan made no reply. His face was turned toward Harshaw with a certain unresponsiveness, an inscrutable questioning, a cadaverous gravity. His hollow eyes were very bright and large. Somehow they put Harshaw out of countenance. Something there was in their expression beyond his skill to decipher. He became a trifle embarrassed, and yet he could not have said why. He went on at random. He had observed that a number of people were remarking them. There was nothing uncommon in the peripatetic method that the interview had taken, but suddenly he found it odd that Gwinnan had not paused.
“That fellow, Mink Lorey, is a most extraordinary and unexpected kind of scamp,” Harshaw proceeded uneasily, making talk. “To my certain knowledge, he cared so little about the girl that he refused to see her when she came to visit him in jail. But the idea that another man admired her seemed to set him wild.”
Gwinnan stopped short.
“What girl?” he asked, in his soft, inexpressive drawl.
“The girl that testified,—Alethea Sayles,” said Harshaw, relieved that Gwinnan had spoken, and striving for his old bluff assurance, but still conscious that he had lost his tact. “She was pretty, very pretty indeed, and you were not alone in having the good taste to notice it. The rest of us didn’t have to pay for it with a broken head, though, eh, judge? Ha! ha!”
There was a moment’s pause.