e printed pages of the newspaper with no outward sign
of excitement. Then he took out his money, quietly, and counted it,
with meditative and pursed-up lips.
His eyes fell on a paltry handful of silver, with the dulled gold of
one worn napoleon showing from its midst. He remembered, suddenly,
that it was the third time he had counted that ever-lightening handful
since partaking of his frugal coffee and rolls that morning. So he
dropped the coins back into his pocket, dolefully, one by one, and took
the deep breath of a man schooling himself to face the unfaceable.
Then he looked about the room, almost vacuously, as though the
old-fashioned wooden bed and the faded curtains and the blank walls
might hold some oracular answer to the riddle that lay before him.
Then he went to the open window, and looked out, almost as vacuously,
over the unbroken blue distance of the Mediterranean, trembling into
soft ribbons of silver where the wind rippled its surface, yellowing
into a fluid gold towards the path of the lowering sun, deepening,
again, into a brooding turquoise along the flat rim of the sea to the
southward where the twin tranquilities of sky and water met.
It was the same unaltering Mediterranean, the same expanse of eternal
sapphire that he had watched from the same Riviera window, day in and
day out, with the same vague but unceasing terror of life and the same
forlorn sense of helplessness before currents of destiny that week by
week seemed to grow too strong for him. He turned away from the soft,
exotic loveliness of the sea and sky before him, with a little gesture
of impatience. The movement was strangely like that of a feverish
invalid turning from the ache of an opened shutter.
Durkin took up the newspaper once more, and unfolded it with listlessly
febrile fingers. It was the Paris edition of "The Herald," four days
old. Still again, and quite mechanically now, he read the familiar
advertisement. It was the same message, word for word, that had first
caught his eye as he had sipped his coffee in the little palm-grown
garden of the Hotel Bristol, in Gibraltar, nearly three weeks before.
"Presence of James L. Durkin, electrical expert, essential at office of
Stephens & Streeter, patent solicitors, etc., Empire Building, New York
City, before contracts can be culminated. Urgent."
Only, at the first reading of those pregnant words, all the even and
hopeless monotony, all the dull and barren plane o
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