Unable to move Mr. Lund watched a tall man come toward the shadows which hid Gipsey Lee.
“We ought to warn him,” Mr. Lund protested.
“Not on your life,” he was told. “This time it is punishment, not murder. She saved his life and he deserted her. Pereira’s pretending to be drunk. I wonder why. He dare not touch a drop because he has Bright’s disease in the last stages.”
A minute later Mr. Lund, indignant and commanding as his inches permitted, was shaking an angry finger at his host.
“You’ve no right to frighten me,” he exclaimed, “with your Gipsey Lee and Pereira when it was only poor Mrs. Clarke waiting for that drunken scamp of a husband who spends all he earns at the corner saloon.”
Heavy steps passed along the passage. It was Clarke making his bedward way to his wife’s verbal accompaniment.
“You ought to be pleased to get a thrill like that for nothing,” said Anthony Trent laughing. “I’d pay good money for it.”
“I don’t like it,” Mr. Lund insisted. “I thought you meant it.”
“I did,” the other asserted, “for the moment. New York is full of such stories and if they don’t happen in this street they happen in another. They always happen after midnight and I’ve got to put them down on the old machine. Somewhere a Gipsey Lee is waiting for a defaulting South American banker or a Captain Despard is planning to get a priceless stone, or a humbler Vierick plotting to climb into an inviting window, or some one like your boyhood chum Blodgett planning to get his hands around some one’s throat.”
Anthony Trent leaned from the window and breathed in the soft night air.