She hung up.
“He was referring to that cruise with him?” asked Clifford.
“Yes.”
Clifford regarded her curiously: What was her purpose in summoning Mr. Morton into this situation?
“I want to get Jack down into a taxi-cab,” Mary went on. “How can I do it?—and without attracting attention?”
“That’s easy. Nothing of that sort attracts attention at Le Minuit.”
He pressed a button, and from the waiter who appeared he demanded the immediate presence of Monsieur Le Bain. Two minutes later the proprietor entered.
“Joe,” Clifford ordered briefly, “get Mr. Morton’s things, whatever they are, and have two of your waiters help him down into a taxi, and have the taxi wait till we come down. Everything quiet, mind you.”
“Sure,” said the Frenchman from somewhere below Fourteenth Street.
Presently two waiters supported the still stupefied Jack out of the room; a little later Clifford and Mary passed unheeded through the hilarious patrons of Le Minuit, down the stairway, and across the light-flooded sidewalk out into the waiting taxi-cab, in one corner of which Jack huddled limply. Here they sat silent, waiting. Clifford had a sense that it was not the old Mary Regan beside whom he sat—but that new Mary Regan who did not know herself: and he had a sense that, with her at least, big issues were still at stake.