Adventure stories; Crime -- Fiction; Detective and mystery stories; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
To Clifford it seemed that all Mary’s shrewd scheming had brought her
up at last against an unsurmountable wall. Again Clifford wondered
what was passing behind that pale face: wondered what was going to be
the ending of her great worldly plan, which thus far had had so many
undreamed-of developments: wondered how all this tangled affair was
going to come out for her--and again wondered which of the two persons
he knew in her was to be the dominant Mary Regan when this matter had
played itself through to its unguessable conclusion.
The taxi-cab halted, and Clifford escorted her to the door of her
apartment house.
“What are you going to do next, if you don’t mind telling?” he asked.
“I don’t know yet--perhaps nothing,” she said absently. And then, with
quiet vigor: “Jack’s not to blame so much for what he is. It’s chiefly
his father’s fault. I wish I could make his father pay!” Her dark eyes
flashed, her figure tensed with sudden purpose. “Yes, somehow I am
going to make his father pay!”
She held out her hand, and gave him a steady look. “At any rate, I want
to thank you. You’ve done all you could for me. Good-night.”
“Good-night.”
He watched her in--this strange, confident young woman, so tangled in
the web of her own spinning, whom he had drifted into so strangely
helping, and whom, though she could now have no part in his life, he
knew he still loved. But back in the taxi-cab, his mind at once was
on another matter. He had glimpsed Peter Loveman lurking within the
doorway during the end of that scene in front of Le Minuit; and he knew
that keen little lawyer was no man to give up merely because he seemed
to be beaten. In fact Loveman would act all the more quickly for just
that reason.
Clifford drove two blocks to the south, a block west, and a block
north, then, ordering his cab to wait, he stepped out and walked north
to the next corner. He peered around this and waited. Presently he saw
what he more than half expected to see--Loveman crossing from a taxi to
the entrance of Mary’s apartment house. He saw him press Mary’s button,
and after a space saw Loveman push open the door and enter.
Clifford tried to guess what plan the little lawyer, whose wiles he
had exposed to Mary only an hour before at Le Minuit, could regard
as so important that it had to be undertaken at two o’clock in the
morning, without the loss of a single possible minute. He wanted to
slip down the street, enter the house, and try to watch and overhear;
but the chauffeur in Loveman’s waiting taxi might also be Loveman’s
lookout and personal guard. There was nothing for it but to wait where
he was and watch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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