"Forgot the office key and came back for it." I felt no call to enter on Macartney's embassy regarding Hutton. "Going to bed?"
Dudley gulped down a horn of whisky that would have settled any two men in the bunk house, nodded, and shut the door behind him. I put out the light and sat on in the living room alone, how long I don't know. I had nothing pleasant to think of, either. It was no use my trying to imagine that Tatiana Paulina Valenka was not going to marry Dudley, whatever I had hoped about Paulette Brown. As far as any chance of her loving me was concerned, I had lost my dream girl forever. She was none of my business any more, except that—"By gad, she is my business," I thought in a sudden bitter fury, "as far as Hutton and our gold! If I'm right, and he's hiding round here, I'll put a stopper on any more hold-ups. And I'll make good and sure she never goes out to meet him again, too!"
As I swore it I turned away from the dead fire and the dark room, that looked as if we'd all deserted it hours ago, and went Indian-silent into the hallway. And my heart contracted in a hard, tight lump.
The passage was light as day, with the moon full on the window at the end of it. And wrapped in a shawl, with her back to me, stood my dream girl, undoing the front door as noiselessly as I had come into the passage.
I let her do it. The hallway on which Marcia's bedroom door opened, let alone Dudley's, was no place for Paulette Brown and myself to talk. But I was just three feet behind her as she slid around the corner of the shack, toward the bush that lay dark against the cold winter moon. And I rustled with my feet on purpose, so that she turned and saw me, with the moon full on my face.
"You sha'n't do it," I said. I did not know I had made a stride to her till I felt her arm under my hand. "You sha'n't go!"
My dream girl, who had two names and belonged to Dudley anyhow, said nothing at all. She and I, who had really nothing to do with one another, if I would have laid my soul under her little feet, stood still in the cold moonlight, looking inimically into one another's eyes.