“You’re looking fine,” he declared.
She smiled with pleasure at the undoubted admiration in his tone. In the new and fashionable clothes which she had purchased during the last few days, the artistically coiffured hair, the smart hat and carefully-thought-out details of her toilette, she was a transformed being, in no way different from the half a dozen other young ladies who were gathered with their escorts at the further end of the room.
“I am glad you think so,” she replied. “Seems to me I’ve had nothing else to do since I got here but buy frocks and things.”
He looked at her in a puzzled fashion.
“You didn’t come over with Jocelyn Thew, did you, Nora?” “Of course I didn’t,” she answered indignantly. “If you want to know the truth, it looked as though there was going to be trouble at Fourteenth Street. Dad made a move out West, and I had a fancy for making a little trip this way.”
“Kind of lonesome, isn’t it?” he asked.
“In a way,” she sighed. “Still, I am going on presently to where I fancy I shall meet a few friends.”
“And meanwhile,” he remarked, “you are still friendly with Jocelyn Thew, and you dined last night, didn’t you, with the man who has sworn to hunt him down?”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You know what I think of Jocelyn Thew,” she said. “I’m crazy about him, and always shall be, but I’ve never seen him look twice at a woman yet in his life, and never expect to. Dick!”
“Yes, Nora?”
“May I ask you a question — straight?”
“Of course!”
“Don’t think I mean to say a word against Jocelyn Thew. He’s a white man through and through, and I think if there was any woman in the world he cared for, she would be his slave. But he’s a desperate man. Even now the police are trying to draw their net around him. It was all very well for you, when you were painting New York red, to choose your friends where it pleased you, but your sister — she’s different, isn’t she? — what they call over on our side a society belle. I am not saying that there is a single person in the world too good for Jocelyn Thew to sit down with, but at the present moment — well, he’s hard up against it. Things might happen to him, you know, Dick.”
For a moment the young man was silent. His eyes seemed to look through the walls of the room, seemed to conjure up some spectre from which a moment later he shrank.
“You see, Nora,” he explained, dropping his voice a little, “there was just one time when Jocelyn Thew stood by me like a brick. I was hard up against it and he saved me.”
She leaned a little closer to him.
“I have often wondered,” she murmured. “That was the affair down at the Murchison country house, wasn’t it?”
Richard Beverley assented silently.
“Guess we’ll drink these cocktails,” he said, watching the waiter approach. “Flying takes something out of you all the time, you know, Nora, and although when I am up my nerves are like a rock, I sometimes feel a little shaky at leave time.”
“Drink?” she asked tersely.
“I’ve quit that more or less,” he assured her. “Still, I have been taking some these last few days. Finding Katharine over here with Jocelyn Thew hanging around gave me kind of a shock.”
“You weren’t best pleased to see them together, I should think, were you?”
“No,” he admitted, a little sullenly.
“You’re angry with him, aren’t you?”
“Kind of,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t have complained at anything he’d asked me to do, but it was a low-down trick to get Katharine into this trouble.” His eyes shone out with a dull anger. She watched him curiously.
“Dick, you’re not the boy you were,” she sighed. “Guess you’re sorry you ever came to that supper party at the Knickerbocker, aren’t you?”
He turned and looked at her. He was only twenty-two years old, but there were things in his face from which a man might have shrunk.
“Yes, I am sorry,” he confessed. “I am not blaming anybody but I shall be sorry all my life.”
“Jocelyn Thew treated you very much as he did me,” she went on. “He carried you off your feet. You thought him the most wonderful thing that ever lived. It was the same with me. He has never given as much of himself as his little finger, never even looked at me as though I were a human being, but I’d have scrubbed floors for him a month after we first met. It was just the same with you, only you were a man. You’d have committed murder for his sake, a week after that party.”
“Murder!”
He gave a sudden start, a start that amazed her. His hand was upon her shoulder. His eyes, red with fury, were blazing into hers.
“What’s that you’re saying, Nora? What’s that?”
She was speechless, paralysed by that little staccato cry. A group of people near looked around. She laughed shrilly to cover the intensity of the moment.
“No need to get excited!” she exclaimed. “Pull yourself together,” she went on, under her breath. “Waiter, two more cocktails.” He recovered himself almost at once, but the strained look was there about his mouth.
“Nerves, you see,” he muttered. “I shall be all right again when I get back to France.”
She laid her hand gently upon his arm.
“Dick,” she said, “you are often upon my conscience. You were such a nice boy, back in those days. Everything that’s happened to you seems to have happened since you met Jocelyn Thew that night. He has got some sort of a hold, hasn’t he? What is it?”
The young man moistened his dry lips. The waiter brought their cocktails and he drank his greedily.
“I’ll tell you, Nora,” he promised. “Perhaps it’ll do me good to listen how the story sounds as I tell it. First of all, let us have the thing straight. Jocelyn Thew never helped me into trouble. I was in it, right up to the neck, when I met him.”
“You kept it to yourself,” she murmured curiously.
“Because I was a fool,” he answered, “and because I believed I could pull things straight. But anyway, I was owing Dan Murchison seventy thousand I’d lost at poker. He was kind of shepherding me. He was a rough sort, Dan, and he had an ambitious wife, and I had a name he liked. Well, he was giving a week-end party down at that place of his on the Hudson. He asked me, or rather he ordered me down. I was only too glad to go. Then Mrs. Murchison chipped in — wanted my sister, wanted to put it in the paper. Katharine kicked, of course. So did I. Murchison for the first time showed his teeth — and we both went. Jocelyn Thew was another of the guests.”
“Tough, wasn’t it?”
“Hell! On the way down — I don’t know why, but I was feeling pretty desperate — I told Jocelyn Thew how I stood with Murchison. He listened but he didn’t say much. He never does. It was a rotten party — common people, one or two professional gamblers, a lot of florid, noisy, overdressed, giggling women. After the women were supposed to have gone to bed, we sat down to what Dan Murchison called a friendly game — a hundred dollars ante, and a thousand rise. Jocelyn Thew played, three other men, and Murchison. After about an hour of it, I’d lost over twenty thousand dollars. The others had it between them, except Jocelyn, and about his play there was a very curious thing. He put in his ante regularly when it came to him, but he never made a single bet. Murchison turned to him once.
“‘Say, you must be having rotten cards, Mr. Thew,’ he said.
“Jocelyn shook his head very deliberately. I can hear his reply even now. Kind of quiet it was and deliberate.
“‘I don’t fancy my chances of winning at this game.’
“I knew what he meant later. I didn’t tumble to it at the time. We played till two o’clock. God knows how much I’d lost! Then Murchison called the game off. He locked up his winnings in a little safe let into the wall. I was standing by him, drinking, and I saw the combination. Jocelyn Thew was sitting quite by himself, as though deep in thought. — We all got up to bed somehow. I sat for some hours at the open window. Pretty soon I got sober, and I began to realise what had happened. And all the time I thought of that safe, chock full of money, and the combination ready set. I heard Katharine moving about in her room, and I knew that she was waiting for me to go and say good night. I wouldn’t. I put on a short jacket instead of my dress coat, and I took an electric torch out of my dressing case and I went down-stairs. I’d made up my mind, Nora. I meant to rob that safe.”