w that together there
was no chance of ultimate escape; traveling together the very disparity
of their compared appearances marked them with a fatal and unmistakable
conspicuousness, as though they were daubed with red paint from the same
paint brush; staying together meant ruin--certain, sure. Now, then,
separated and going singly, there might be a thin strand of hope. Yet
the man felt that, parted a single hour from the woman, and she still
alive, his wofully small prospect would diminish and shrink to the
vanishing point--New York juries being most notoriously easy upon women
murderers who give themselves up and turn state's evidence; and, by the
same mistaken processes of judgment, notoriously hard upon their male
accomplices--half a dozen such instances had been playing in flashes
across his memory already.

Neither had so much as hinted at separating. The man didn't speak,
because of a certain idea that had worked itself all out hours before
within his side-flattened skull. The woman likewise had refrained from
putting in words the suggestion that had been uppermost in her brain
from the time they broke into the locked house. Some darting look of
quick, malignant suspicion from him, some inner warning sense, held her
mute at first; and later, as the newborn hate and dread of him grew and
mastered her and she began to canvass ways and means to a certain end,
she stayed mute still.

Whatever was to be done must be done quietly, without a struggle--the
least sound might arouse the policeman at the door below. One thing was
in her favor--she knew he was not armed; he had the contempt and the
fear of a tried and proved poisoner for cruder lethal tools.

It was characteristic also of the difference between these two that
Devine should have had his plan stage-set and put to motion long before
the woman dreamed of acting. It was all within his orderly scheme of the
thing proposed that he, a shrinking coward, should have set his squirrel
teeth hard and risked detection twice in that night: once to buy a
basket of overripe fruit from a dripping Italian at a sidewalk stand,
taking care to get some peaches--he just must have a peach, he had
explained to her; and once again when he entered a dark little store on
Second Avenue, where liquors were sold in their original packages, and
bought from a sleepy, stupid clerk two bottles of a cheap domestic
champagne--"to give us the strength for making a fresh start," he told
her gl