The girl's eyes met his with passionate sorrow in their misty deeps. Garson gave a significant glance toward Dick Gilder, then his gaze returned to her. There was a smoldering despair in that look. There were, as well, an entreaty and a command.
“So,” he went on, “you must go along with him, Mary.... Won't you? It's the best thing to do.”
The girl could not answer. There was a clutch on her throat just then, which would not relax at the call of her will.
The tension of a moment grew, became pervasive. Burke, accustomed as he was to scenes of dramatic violence, now experienced an altogether unfamiliar thrill. As for Garson, once again the surge of feeling threatened to overwhelm his self-control. He must not break down! For Mary's sake, he must show himself stoical, quite undisturbed in this supreme hour.
Of a sudden, an inspiration came to him, a means to snap the tension, to create a diversion wholly efficacious. He would turn to his boasting again, would call upon his vanity, which he knew well as his chief foible, and make it serve as the foil against his love. He strove manfully to throw off the softer mood. In a measure, at least, he won the fight—though always, under the rush of this vaunting, there throbbed the anguish of his heart.
“You want to cut out worrying about me,” he counseled, bravely. “Why, I ain't worrying any, myself—not a little bit! You see, it's something new I've pulled off. Nobody ever put over anything like it before.”
He faced Burke with a grin of gloating again.
“I'll bet there'll be a lot of stuff in the newspapers about this, and my picture, too, in most of 'em! What?”
The man's manner imposed on Burke, though Mary felt the torment that his vainglorying was meant to mask.
“Say,” Garson continued to the Inspector, “if the reporters want any pictures of me, could I have some new ones taken? The one you've got of me in the Gallery is over ten years old. I've taken off my beard since then. Can I have a new one?” He put the question with an eagerness that seemed all sincere.