Harry's straining ears caught now the dragging rustle of a skirt. Echo was moving slowly across the floor, and in a moment he saw her again through the slender opening. She was standing tense and straight, her hands wrung together, finger twisting against finger, before the desk telephone. He saw her hand go out to the instrument, then draw back as though it had been a poisonous snake. Then suddenly he saw her seize the transmitter and put it to her ear. The bell whirred.
"Madison, seven-thirty-two."
There was a pause, in which she repeated the number, and in it Harry felt that her face had hardened and set, like some cooling plastic beneath an invisible mould.
"Is that—is it ... Mr. Cameron Craig?"
In spite of his iron control, Harry could not repress a start. He knew now where he was! The house behind whose curtain he perforce skulked with a brace of thieves, was Cameron Craig's! And she, on this very day, had journeyed here too. A sense of an overfate, sardonic and unescapable, rushed upon him. What a topsy-turveydom of chance, what a dove-tailing of accident, had wrought for this strange contretemps! In the instant she waited a harrowing question stabbed him. What was she doing here, to-night, at midnight—in this environment which had bred unseemly stories—to enter which, under such circumstances, a woman must be unmindful of what should be most dear?
"... Do you know my voice? Yes, you are right.... Unbelievable, yes. Many things are unbelievable that—happen. Listen. I am at your house, in your library.... No! Wait. I have something to say to you, now. You shall answer it first. Once you asked me to marry you. I will do so, on one condition.... The—the letters written by my father. You will not use them, publish them. You will give them into my hands.... Yes.... One has been photographed—yes, the plate. You swear to do so, when I am your wife? ... Yes, to-night—if you—wish.... What? In—in five minutes? ..."
The receiver clattered down upon the desk, as she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands. To her the broken sentences had knelled hope gone, the passing of youth and love, the coming of a night in which was no star; but to the man sitting in such assiduous stillness behind the curtains, they had told a story that sent the warm blood coursing through his veins. Instead of being false to him, Echo was really sacrificing herself on the altar of name and family. She did not love the man with whom she had just spoken! It was constraint that had sent her there at that dubious hour, to make a bitter bargain. Letters written by her father? What they were—in what way compromising—Harry could not guess. Some indiscreet correspondence perhaps, which, twisted out of context, might be made ground of malicious political criticism. He knew her love for her father. In some way she had learned of these letters, had scented danger to him, and now would ward the harm from him at any cost to herself! "Think as gently of me as you can"—the words of her note passed through Harry's mind. When she wrote that she had known that she should give herself to Craig! He felt a whirl of rage. The cowardly, contemptible cad, who would have his desire at the cost of all that was decent and clean-handed! It should never be, never, never! Why else had fate dropped him there, like a stone from a sling? And yet for the moment he was as helpless as a rat in a trap. There, only a half-dozen steps away lay those letters, the safe door unlocked. Yet the steely pressure on his temple told him that a single word, a move, and he would be ingloriously past rendering aid to anybody, with a bullet in his skull.
Harry was conscious that the two men beside him exchanged glances—they were going to make a dash for it. His every nerve tightened. But at that instant the door opened upon the obsequious servant. "Did you ring, Madame?" he asked.
"I rang the telephone," she replied dully. "I called up Mr. Craig. He is coming."
"Very good, madame." This time he did not leave, but moved about the room, setting straight a book upon the table, adjusting a vase, glancing furtively at her the while. The moment for flight had passed.