Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that
hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is prone to sudden
and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread
isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of
the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes
whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.
The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh
smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of
dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror
of a myriad lights.
Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street
lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods
of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner
seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights
revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.
Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her,
asked if he could be in any way of service.
She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I
am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"
The cab was passing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a
street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.
"It's just four."
"Thank you...."
"Very tired?"
"Very...."
He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his
shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.
"Can I do anything?"
"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for
the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely
touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.
"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."
"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."
Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?
Lanyard assured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to
persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It
seemed so little like her.
Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient
inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act
of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.
There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly
to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circumstances the
intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.
True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa:
either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard
could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught
to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had
breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!
A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of
his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving
weighed....
Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to
piece together inconsecutive snatches of information gained from Crane
in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service
operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching
for evidences of their impudent activities.
It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of
its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out
of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of
conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.
So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia
Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the
least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding
force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as
he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of
this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.
The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the
management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's
habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.
Revel.
Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the
meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.
As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of
Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest
but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth
Street.
The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as
the watchers were able to assure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had
returned--Dressier having anticipated them there by something like half an
hour.
By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....
And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward
through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the
city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.
A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time
the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there
was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with
premonition of the ardour of another day.
Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender
fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she passed on, while he turned to
bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by
tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so
much to be said that was impossible to say just then.
Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of
her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that
trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish
rings beneath the eyes.
"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say
good-night and ... I am sorry."
"Sorry?" she echoed.
"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your
thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that
only makes me feel all the more regretful."
"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm
afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."