With a spring, lithe and quick as a cat, Dave Henderson was through the window, and the dark form was wriggling and squirming in his grasp, and a low cry came—and Dave Henderson swore sharply under his breath.
It was a woman! A woman! Well, that didn't matter! One hundred thousand dollars was gone from his dress-suit case, and this woman was crawling to the fire escape from the next room at three o'clock in the morning—that was what mattered!
They were on the iron platform now, and he pushed her none too gently along it toward the window of his own room—into the light. And then his hands dropped from her as though suddenly bereft of power, and as suddenly lifted again, and, almost fierce in their intensity, gripped at her shoulders, and forced her face more fully into the light.
“Teresa!” he whispered hoarsely. “You—Teresa!”
She was trying to smile, but it was a tremulous effort. The great, dark eyes, out of a face that was ivory white, lifted to his, and faltered, and dropped again.
“It's you, Teresa—isn't it?” His voice, his face, his eyes, were full of incredulous wonder.
Her lips were still quivering in their smile. She nodded her head in a sort of quaint, wistful way.
The blood was pounding and surging in his veins. Teresa! Teresa was here, standing here before him! Not that phantom picture that had come to him so often in the days and nights since he had left San Francisco—the glorious eyes, half veiled by the long lashes, though they would not look at him, were real; this touch of his hands upon her shoulders, this touch that thrilled him, was real, and——
Slowly his hands fell away from her; and as though to kill and stifle joy, and mock at gladness, and make sorry sport of ecstasy, there came creeping upon him doubt, black, ugly, and bitter as gall.
Yes, it was Teresa! And at sight of her there had come suddenly and fully, irrefutably, the knowledge that he cared for her; that love, which comes at no man's bidding, had come to him for her. Yes, it was Teresa! But what was she doing here? In view of that money, gone in the last few hours from his dress-suit case, what could Teresa Capriano be doing here in the next room to his?