"Lord! the jobs put through in the name of Relief!" Taylor exclaimed.
On his second evening in New York Napier went with the Van Pelts, his hosts, to hear "Lohengrin" at the Metropolitan. In a stage-box sat Miss Greta, very handsome, in green, with a silver wreath on her fair hair. The elderly lady beside her, according to the Van Pelts, was a well-known "society leader" with a taste for philanthropy. She had largely financed a certain branch of American relief work. That was her husband just coming into the box. But the girl—the Van Pelts couldn't make out the girl. Napier could.
The next day, three tables away from him, at a men's luncheon given to Napier at a hotel, Greta again, with a different party except for Nan. Napier saw the girl's face brighten in that instant of catching sight of him. He saw her half rise, and then, as Greta fixed her eyes on Nan's, Napier saw the girl subside. From time to time she looked over wistfully. In a general movement after luncheon, emptying and refilling the great room, he was able to time his going out so that he might snatch a word with her.
"You haven't forgotten where I am?" she said hurriedly after they had allowed new-comers to separate them a little from their respective parties.
No, he hadn't forgotten; but he had read that she—he nodded in Greta's direction—was also at the same hotel.
"And that keeps you away! That's all you care!"
"Do you want, then," he said, with that daring which the sense of being safely lost in a crowd will lend—"do you want me to care?"
"No! At least I oughtn't to." Greta and her guests were waiting. "If I'd known how to find you," Nan went on speaking deliberately, as though making a declaration of rights, "I should have written you. I could let you see part of a letter I've had from Julian. He tells news the papers don't."
Napier thanked her gravely and gave a private address. As he saw her disappear with "that woman," he said to himself for the thousandth time, If only he'd been allowed to tell Nan about that Gull Island villainy at the time, she couldn't have gone on making her loyalty a cloak for their common enemy!
The temptation to use his knowledge now, strove in him with an instinctive as well as a reasoned shrinking. The Gull Island affair couldn't, he argued, still be a secret of any state importance. But in proportion as he cleared away that obstacle, the clearer yet another stood forth. It was one of the evils of a most evil time that he, Gavan Napier, of all men, had been forced to play a leading part in the violent end of a man with whom he and this gentle, sensitive girl had broken bread! Napier caught again that animal-like gleam of bared teeth as Carl Pforzheim writhed across the table for his pistol, saw again the gush of scarlet after the figure turned, met the knife, and fell back against the wall. Let all that horror be hidden in the island earth and in oblivion. If Nan knew, never, never could it be forgotten.