"Going off like that without—you're full of your millions! Small blame—small blame!" Driscoll wrote down the address and handed it to his friend. "Bring her back with you, if you can; but it'll do if she's here by ten."
Outside the court Gano hailed a fiacre and drove barely five minutes before he was set down at a door in a tenement not conspicuously different from his own. A shabby man with long hair, wearing a velveteen jacket, had just stopped, closed his dripping umbrella, and rung.
When the door opened he passed in without question.
"Madame Burne?" asked Gano.
"Au quatrième. Encore de la boue dans mon escalier!" muttered the concierge. "Faudra qu'elle s'en aille à la fin."
Gano ran up two flights, passing three girls in the dim light, who were coming down. He almost overtook the shabby man, who seemed in feverish haste. Gano slackened his pace at the foot of the third flight. The shabby man hurried up without looking back, fled round the passage to the left, and knocked at a door facing the banisters. Without pausing for permission, he turned the knob and went in, letting out a gush of light and the confused sound of voices. Gano was conscious of a glow of comfort in the assurance of his heart that the room entered by such a creature, with ceremony so scant, was certainly not Mary Burne's. The shabby fellow had flung the door to, but the worn-out fastening didn't catch. The door rebounded and stood partly open. Two-thirds of the way up this last flight Gano turned his head in the direction of the voices, and saw through the banisters and the open door Mary Burne shaking hands with the man who had just entered. Gano stopped dead. He didn't hear anything she said; he wasn't conscious of trying to do so. He stood staring, incredulous. Presently she passed out of his range of vision. He could see some of the others now, and caught here and there a single unenlightening word. He wondered vaguely at hearing a room full of persons speaking English again. Should he go in, or should he go back? He felt an indescribable shrinking from meeting Mary among that shady lot. Men, too—more than one! What was a woman like Mary Burne doing with such disreputable-looking— He had lately been killing time for Driscoll by reading aloud that original story, Beggars All. It came to him like a form of nightmare that their Madonna Mary was a confidence woman. This gathering was a grim kind of thieves' tea-party, but they had left the door open! As he gave up straining to catch a glimpse of Mary, and looked closer at those nearest the door, he saw there were one or two women he would not have thought suspicious under other circumstances. Then one of these moved away, and revealed a creature with raddled cheeks and pencilled eyes, wearing her dingy finery with a clumsiness not French, and speaking now to Mary Burne, who had come to her side—speaking with a cockney tongue, and eying her hostess with mixed suspicion and curiosity. A man, as obviously American, looking like a broken-down billiard-marker, stood behind, and sitting by the door was a well-dressed gray-haired woman, with frightened, shifty eyes. Obvious tramps and beggars would have fitted better into any preconceived scheme of benevolence. But these were people of some former decency, some present alertness of intelligence, like the dregs of the foreigner class in any land, lower than the outcast born, because these aliens had once ambition, had initiative enough to venture forth to better their estate, and had not fallen so low without desperate clutching at foul means to keep afloat. On each face that undefinable stamp of failure. What is it? Where is it? Not always in the eyes or on the lips, not always expressed in dress or even bearing—in no one thing that one may lay a finger on and say, "I know him by this mark!" There is no name for that elusive, eloquent, yet indelible sign life sets upon the faces of the lost. Yet all men know it when they see it, and instinctively turn away their eyes.
In the group that closed about Mary, some one was protesting about something.
"Perhaps Jean Latreille was right," said a man Gano couldn't see.
"Of course he was. You need not to blame him."