f this affair, _it will be the
last_!"

"It will be the last!" repeated the woman, broodingly, but her words
were not so much a declaration as a prayer.

CHAPTER XVII

THE TANGLED SKEIN

It was the _Slavonia's_ last night at sea. In another twelve hours the
pilot would be aboard, Quarantine would be passed, the engines would be
slowed down, and the great steamer would be lying at her berth in the
North River, discharging her little world of life into the scattered
corners of a waiting continent. Already, on the green baize
bulletin-board in the companionway the purser had posted the customary
notice to the effect that the steamer's operator was now in connection
with New York City, and that wireless messages might be received for
all points in Europe and America.

There was a chill in the air, and to Frances Durkin, sitting beside
Keenan on the promenade deck, there seemed something restless and
phantasmal and ghostlike in the thin, North Atlantic sunlight, after
the mellow and opulent gold of the Mediterranean calms. It seemed to
her to be a presage of the restless movement and tumult which she felt
to be before her.

She had not been altogether amiss in her predictions of what the past
fortnight would bring forth. She had erred a little, she felt, in her
estimate of Keenan's character; yet she had not been mistaken in the
course of action which he was to pursue.

For, from the beginning, after the constraint of their first meeting on
board had passed away, he had shown her a direct and open friendliness
which now and then even gave rise to a vague and uneasy suspicion in
her own mind. This friendliness had brought with it an easier exchange
of confidences, then a seeming intimacy and good-fellowship which, at
times, made it less difficult for Frank to lose herself in her role.

Keenan, one starlit night under the shadow of a lifeboat amidships, had
even acknowledged to her the dubiousness of the mission that had taken
him abroad. Later, he had outlined to her what his life had been,
telling her of his struggles when a penniless student of the City law
school, of his early and unsavory criminal-court efforts, and his
unhappy plunge into the morasses of Eighth-ward politics, of his
campaign against the "Dave Kelly" gang, and the death of his political
career which came with that opposition, of his swinging round to the
tides of the times and taking up with bucket-shop work, of his "shark"
lawyer p