His luncheon with Frances, however, was not what he had looked for. He met her in front of the West Ninth Street restaurant as she was stepping out of her taxi-cab. She seemed unusually pale and worried, though an honestly happy smile flitted across her lightly veiled face as she caught sight of him. In a moment again her manner changed. “We are being watched,” she said, in a low voice. “Watched! By whom?” Their eyes met and he could see the alarm that had taken possession of her. “By MacNutt!” Durkin grew a little paler as he looked down at her. “He has shadowed us for two days,” she went on in her tense, low, quick tones. “He followed me out of our own building, and I got away from him only by leaving my taxi and slipping through a department store.” “Did he speak to you?” “No, not a word. I don’t even think he dreams I have seen him. But it is hard to say how much he has found out. Oh, Jim, he’s slow and sly and cunning, and he won’t strike until the last minute. But when he does, he will try to—to smash us both!” “I’ll kill that man as sure as I’m standing on this curbstone, if he ever butts in on this game of ours! This isn’t pool-room piking we’re at now, Frank—this is big and dangerous business!” He had remembered the cigar-light in the dark passageway, and the mysterious disappearance, then later the taxi-cab that had strangely followed his own. “No, no, Jim; you mustn’t say that!” she was murmuring to him, with a little shiver. “I’m afraid of him!” “Well, _I’m_ not,” said Durkin, and he swore softly and wickedly, as he repeated his threat. “What does _he_ want to come into our lives for, now? He’s over and done with, long ago!” “We are never over and done with anything we have been,” she almost sobbed, half tragically. Durkin looked at her, a little impatient, and also a little puzzled. “Frank, what is this man MacNutt to you?” She was silent. “What has he ever been to you, then?” “He is a cruel and cunning and bitterly vindictive man,” she said, evading the question. “And if he determined to crush a person, he would do it, although it took him twenty years.” “Then I certainly _will_ kill him!” declared Durkin, shaken with a sudden unreasoning sweep of white passion. It was not until he had half finished his luncheon that his steadiness of nerve came back to him. Here he had been shadowing the shadower, step by step and move by move, and all along, even in those moments when he had taken such delight in covertly and unsuspectingly watching his quarry, a second shadow had been secretly and cunningly stalking his own steps! “It will be a fight to the finish, whatever happens!” he declared belligerently, still harping on the string of his new unhappiness. CHAPTER XXIV