Scott, Mack, it’s easy enough for you to talk, but it was fool’s luck, pure fool’s luck, I ever got this wire up! First, I had forty feet of water-pipe, then eighty feet o’ brick wall, then over fifty feet of cornice, and about twice as much eave-trough, hangin’ on all the time by my eyelashes, and dog-sick waitin’ to be pinched with the goods on! Hold on, there—what’s this?”

The sounder had given out a tremulous little quaver; then a feeble click or two; then was silent once more.

“Lost it again!” said Mackenzie, under his breath.

“Let me look over that relay a minute!” broke in Durkin. It was the type of box-relay usually used by linemen, with a Morse key attached to the base-board; and he ran his eye over it quickly. Then, with a deft movement or two he released the binding of the armature lever screws, and the next moment the instrument felt the pulse of life, and spoke out clearly and distinctly. Mackenzie looked up at the newcomer, for the first time, with an actual and personal interest.

“That’s the trick, all right!” he said, with an admiring shake of the head.

“Listen,” Durkin cried, gleefully, however, holding up a finger. “That’s Corcoran, the old slob! He’s sending through the New Orleans returns!” And he chuckled as he listened with inclined ear.

“That’s Corcoran, same old slob as ever!” And still again he chuckled, a little contemptuously, with the disdain of the expert for the slovenly sender. He remembered, with a touch of pride, his own sending three years before at the Kansas City Telegraphers’ Convention, and the little cheer that broke from the audience in the great hall as he left the test table. It was not at his mere speed they had cheered, for he could do little more than forty-five words a minute, but because, as the chairman had later said, it was so clean-cut and neat and incisive—“as pure as a Rocky Mountain trout stream!”

“There they are!” said Mackenzie.

The four silent figures leaned a little closer over the clicking instrument of insensate brass—leaned intent and motionless, with quickened breathing and dilated nostrils and strangely altering faces, as though they were far from a quiet little back sewing-room, and were indeed beholding vast issues and participating in great efforts.

“We’ve got ’em, at last!” said MacNutt, quietly, mopping his face and pacing the little room with feverish steps.

“Yes, we’ve got ’em!” echoed Mackenzie, jubilantly.

Frances Candler, the woman, said nothing. But Durkin could feel her breath playing on the back of his neck; and when he turned to her he could see by her quick breathing and widened pupils that she, too, had been reading the wire. And again he wondered, as he looked at her wide forehead and those warm yet firm lips in which he could see impulsiveness still waywardly lurking, how she ever came to such a place. To Durkin—who had heard of woman bookies and sheet-writers and touts in his day—she seemed so soft, so flower-like, in her pale womanhood, that she still remained to him one of the mysteries of a mysterious day.

The woman saw the play of the quicker thought on his face, and the impetuous warmth in his eyes as he gazed up at her, still half-timidly. And seeing it, she looked quickly away.

“No goo-gooin’ there, you folks,” broke in MacNutt, brusquely. As he was turning hurriedly away he looked back for a hesitating moment, from Durkin to the woman, and from the woman to Durkin again. If he was about to say anything further on the point to them, he changed his mind before speaking, and addressed himself once more to Mackenzie.

“Now, Mack, we’ve got to get a move on! Get some of that grime off, and your clothes on, quick!” Then he turned back to the other two at the operating table.

“I’ve certainly got a couple o’ good-lookers in you two, all right, all right!” he said, Durkin thought half mockingly. “But I want you to get groomed up, Durkin, so’s to do justice to that Fifth Avenue face o’ yours! Better get rigged out complete, before trouble begins, for you’re goin’ to move among some lot o’ swell people. And you two’ve got to put on a lot o’ face, to carry this thing through.”

Durkin laughed contentedly, for his eyes had just been following the line of the woman’s profile.

“Remember,” continued MacNutt, crisply, “I want you two to do the swell restaurants—in reason, of course, in reason!—and drive round a good deal, and haunt the Avenue a bit, and push through the Waldorf-Astoria every day or two, and drop in at Penfield’s lower house whenever you get word from me. You’d better do the theatres now and then, too—I want you to be seen, remember,—but always together! It may be kind o’ hard, not bein’ able to pick your friend, Durkin, but Frank knows the ropes, and how much not to spend, and what to fight shy of, and who to steer clear of—and I guess she can explain things as you go along.”

He turned back once more, from the doorway.

“Now, remember,—don’t answer that ’phone unless Mack or me gives the three-four ring! If she rings all night, don’t answer! And ‘Battery Park,’ mind, means trouble. When you’re tipped off with that, get the stuff in the safe, if you can, before you break away. That’s all, I guess, for now!” And he joined the man called Mack in the hall, and together they hurried downstairs, and let themselves out, leaving Durkin and his quiet-eyed colleague alone.

He sat and looked at her, dazed, bewildered, still teased by the veil of unreality which seemed to sway between him and the world about him. It seemed to him as though he were watching a hurrying, shifting drama from a distance,—watching it as, in his early days in New York, he used to watch the Broadway performances from his cramped little gallery seat.

“Am I awake?” he asked weakly.

Then he laughed recklessly, and turned to her once more, abstractedly rubbing his stubbled chin, and remembering to his sudden shame that he had gone unshaved for half a week. Now that MacNutt was away he hoped to see her in her true light. Some mere word or posture, he thought, would brush the entire enigma away.

“Am I awake?” he repeated, pushing his hand up through his hair. He was still watching her for some betraying touch of brazenness. He could be more at ease with her, he felt, when once she had reconciled herself with her uncouth surroundings, through the accidental but inevitable touch of vulgarity which was to establish what she really was.

“Yes; it is all very real!” she laughed quietly, but restrainedly. For the second time he noticed her white, regular teeth, as she hurried about, straightening up the belittered room.

During his narrow and busy life Durkin had known few women; never before had he known a woman like this one, with whom destiny had so strangely ordained that he should talk and drive and idle, work and watch and plot. He looked once more at her thick, tumbled chestnut hair, at the soft pallor of her oval cheek, and the well-gowned figure, as she stooped over a condenser,—wondering within himself how it would all end, and what was the meaning of it.

“Well, this certainly does beat me!” he said, at last, slowly, yet contentedly enough.

The young woman looked at him; and he caught a second glimpse of her wistfully pensive smile, while his heart began to thump, in spite of himself. He reached out a hesitating hand, as though to touch her.