Forgetful of where he was, Clifford stood bare-headed and stockstill in the lobby. Mary Regan’s sudden reappearance out of the silence, the vacancy, of six months’ absence, sent his mind flashing over the past, the present, the future, touching in chaotic wonderment the high spots of his strange relationship with her.... Daughter of that one-time famous cynic and famous master criminal, “Gentleman Jim” Regan, dead these five years, she had passed her girlhood in the cynical philosophy of the little court surrounding her father,—had made that philosophy her own,—and, grown into young womanhood, she had joined that great crime entrepreneur, her Uncle Joe Russell, in many of his more subtle enterprises. It was at the beginning of this career that Clifford’s life had come into contact with hers. Police Commissioner Thorne had ordered him to “cover” the pair. From the first Clifford had conceived the idea that her criminal point of view was not an expression of her true nature, but was a habit of mind developed in her by association: and he had proceeded upon the theory that a bigger rôle, than merely to make arrests, would be to arouse the real Mary Regan to her true self.... The conflicts between the two!—her hostility to him!—his ultimate success, or seeming success, when he had broken through her shell of defensive cynicism—and last of all, that parting scene down in Washington Square in the dusk of the on-coming dawn!...
He lived through that scene for a briefest moment—he was always living over that scene. He had told her that he loved her; and she, admitting that she loved him, had said, “But that doesn’t mean I can marry you.” “Then, what does it mean?” he had demanded. A look of decision had come into her face—how vividly he recalled every minutia of their one love-scene!—and she had said:—
“Before we can talk definitely about such things, I want to go off somewhere, alone, and think over what you have said about me. If I am not what I used to be—if I am really that different person you say I am, I want to get acquainted with myself. I seem so strange to myself, it all seems so strange. I hope you are right—but I must be sure—very sure—and so I am going away.”
“But when you come back?” he had cried.
“A lot may happen before that,” she had answered gravely. “A lot to you, and a lot to me.”
“But when you come back?” he had insisted.
“When I come back,” she had breathed quaveringly, “if you still think the same way about my being that sort of person—and if I find that it’s really true—”
And then his arms had closed about her and he had kissed her. But even as she had let him, she had murmured almost fearfully: “Remember—a lot—may happen—before then....”
Clifford’s mind leaped forward from that long-gone night to the present. And now she was back—back out of the unknown into which she had disappeared—and back without having sent him a word of any kind! What did it mean, this unannounced return? And what did it mean, her being in company with dapper little Peter Loveman?—man-about-town, and carrying behind that round, amiable smile the shrewdest legal brain of its variety in New York.
Clifford had in reality been standing in the gilded lobby for no more than a minute, though his mind had traversed so wide a space, when a gray-and-black town-car, with a long hood that suggested power ample for a racer, slowed down at the curb and a young man stepped out and hurried into the Grand Alcazar. Fifth Avenue tailors and hatters and haberdashers had equipped him with their best and costliest.