rtained carriage.

"Oh, Jim, Jim, don't let him take me!" she cried mysteriously to the
man she had just robbed. But the man she had just robbed looked at her
with what seemed indifferent eyes, and said nothing.

"Don't you know where he's taking me? Can't you see? It's to
Penfield's!" she cried, through her weakening struggles.

A new and strange paralysis of all his emotions seemed to have crept
over Durkin, as he watched the cab door slammed shut and the horses go
plunging and curveting out through the crowd.

"You'd better get away as quiet as you can!" said the policeman, in an
undertone, for Durkin had slipped a ten-dollar bill into his
unprotesting fingers. "You'd better slide, for if the colonel happens
along I can't do much to help you out!"

Then, with his hand on Durkin's cab door he said, with unfeigned
bewilderment: "Say, what's the game of your actress friend, anyway?"

Durkin turned away in disgust, without answering. She was no longer
his friend; she was his enemy, his betrayer! He had lived by the
sword, and by the sword he should die! He had triumphed through crime,
and through crime he was being undone! He had led her into the paths
of duplicity; he had taught her wrong-doing and dishonor; and with the
very tools he had put in her hand she had cut her way out to liberty,
and turned and defeated him!

Then he remembered the scene on the _Slavonia_, and her passionate cry
for him, for his love. In the wake of this came the memory of still
earlier scenes and still more passionate cries for what he had so
scantily given her.

Then suddenly he smote his knees with his clenched fists, and said
aloud:

"It can't be true! It can't be true!"

CHAPTER XIX

THE ULTIMATE OUTCAST

Any passion so neutral and negative as jealousy soon burned itself out
in an actively positive brain like Durkin's. And it left, as so often
had happened with him, manifold gray ash-heaps of regret for past
misdeeds. It also brought with it the customary revulsion of feeling,
and a prowling hunger for some amendatory activity. Yet with that
hunger came a new and disturbing sense of fear. He was realizing,
almost too late, the predicament into which he and Frank had stumbled,
the danger into which he had passively permitted his wife to drift.

It was not until after two hours of fierce and troubled thought,
however, that Durkin left the Bartholdi, and taking a hansom, drove
down that man-crowded crevas