"Come, is that fair? Did I threaten you with the police?"
"You threatened us. It's the same thing. Well, it doesn't matter. They won't find out anything more than we choose!"
She said this defiantly, ostentatiously throwing in her lot with the dubious characters from whom Max would fain have dissociated her.
"Do you forget," he asked, suddenly, "that these precious friends of yours left you, forgot you, for two whole days—left you to the company of a dead man, to a chance stranger? Is that what you call kindness—friendship—affection?"
She made no answer.
A moment later a voice was heard calling softly: "Carrie?"
The girl came out of the shelter of the eaves, and Max at last caught sight of her face. It was sad, pale, altogether different from what the reckless, defiant, rather hard tones of her latest words would have led him to expect. A haunting face, Max thought.
"I must go," said she. "Good-bye."
"Carrie!" repeated the voice, calling again, impatiently.
Max knew, although he could not see the owner of the voice, that it was "Dick." It was, he thought, a coarse voice, full of intimations of the swaggering self-assertion of the low-class Londoner, who thinks himself the whole world's superior.