thorities. He's a runaway, a fugitive with the district-attorney's
office after him, and he has to move just as quietly as we do. Mark my
words, where he will make his first move, and do anything he's going to
do, will be in New York!"

"Then why can't I prepare the ground for the New York situation,
whatever it may be?" she demanded.

"You mean by standing pat with Keenan?"

"Precisely."

"Then how will you begin?"

"By sending him a note at once, telling him how I slipped away from
Genoa to Venice, and asking him the meaning of the Pobloff attack--in
other words, by appearing so actively suspicious of _him_ that he'll
forget to be suspicious of _me_."

"And what do you imagine he will answer?"

"I think he will send me back word to say absolutely nothing about the
Genoa episode--he may even claim that it's quite beyond his
comprehension. That will give us a chance to meet more naturally, and
then we can talk things over more minutely, at our leisure."

Durkin wheeled on her, half-angrily. Through all their career, he had
remained strangely unschooled to any such concession as this. It was
an affront to his dormant and masculine spirit of guardianship; it
seemed a blow in the teeth of his nurturing instinct, an overriding of
his prerogatives of a man and a husband.

"While you're making love to him on the bridge-deck, on moonlight
nights!" he flung back at her, bitterly.

"Do you think I could?" she murmured, with a ghost of a sigh.

Durkin emitted a little impatient oath.

"Don't swear, Jim!" she reproved him.

The vague prescience that some day he should lose her, that in some
time yet to be she should pass beyond his reach and control, still
again filtered through his consciousness, like a dark and corroding
seepage. He caught her by the arm roughly, and looked into her face,
for one silent and scrutinizing minute.

"Do you care?" she asked, and it seemed to him there was a tremor of
happiness in her tone.

"I _hate_ this part of the business!" he cried, with still another oath.

"Oh, do you care?" she reiterated, as her arms crept about him
valiantly, yet a little timidly.

He surrendered, against his will, to the gentle artillery of her tears.
They startled and unmanned him for a little, they came so unexpectedly,
for as he crushed her in his sudden responding embrace, the impulse, at
that time and in that place, seemed the incongruous outcropping of some
deeply submerged stratum of fee