Riviera!"

Durkin looked out at the terraced hills, at the undulating fields and
the heaped masses of blue mountains under the white Italian moonlight,
and did not speak for several seconds.

He had always carried, while with her, the vague but sustained sense of
being shielded. Until then her hand had always seemed to guard him,
impersonally, as the hand of a busy seeker guards and shelters a
candle. Now, for some mysterious reason, he felt her brooding
guardianship to be something less passive, to be something more
immediate and personal. He knew--and he knew it with a full
appreciation of the irony that lurked in the situation--that her very
timorousness was now endowing him with a new and reckless courage. So
he took her hand, gratefully, before he spoke again.

"Well, whatever happens, we are now in this, not from choice, as you
said before, but from necessity. If it has dangers, Frank, we must
face them."

"It is nothing _but_ danger!"

"Then we must grin and bear it. But as I said, I see no reason why we
should cross our bridges before we come to them. And we'll soon have a
bridge to cross, and a hard one."

"What bridge?"

"I mean Keenan, and everything that will happen in Genoa!"

CHAPTER X

THE TIGHTENING COIL

Henry Keenan, of New York, had leisurely finished his cigar, and had as
leisurely glanced through all the three-day-old London papers. He had
even puzzled, for another half-hour, over the pages of a _Tribuna_.
Then, after gazing in an idle and listless manner about the empty and
uninviting hotel reading-room, he decided that it was time for him to
go up to his room. He made his leisurely way to the lift, ascended to
the fourth floor, stepped out, and drew his room-key from his pocket,
as he walked down the hall, in the same idle and listless manner.

As he turned the corner the listlessness went from his face, and a
change came in his languid yet ever-restless and covert eyes.

For a young woman was standing before his door, trying to fit a key to
the lock. This, he decided as he paused three paces from her and
studied her back, she was doing quite openly, with no slightest sense
of secrecy. She wore a plumed hat, and a dark cloth tailor-made suit
that was unmistakably English. She still struggled with the key,
unconscious of his presence. His tread on the thick carpet had been
light; he had intended to catch her, beyond equivocation, in the act.
But now something abo