Uncle George seemed not the least startled by Clifford’s exclamation. He turned—and then there was surprise enough in his voice:—

“Hello—Peter Loveman with her!”

Clifford, recovered from his brief paralysis, arose and hurried between the tables. But the pair had already turned into the entrance and did not note[12] him. As Clifford came into the gilded and bepalmed lobby, he saw her, aided by four eager Grand Alcazar flunkeys and by Loveman, looking a grotesquely small grand opera impresario in his silk hat and fur coat, stepping into a closed car. By running Clifford could have caught her, or by calling he could have gained her attention. But at that instant he remembered the essence of their bargain, that he should make no attempt to seek her out until she sent for him. That remembrance checked him; the door closed upon the rose-velvet figure, the car slid off through Broadway’s incandescent brilliance, and she was gone.

[12]

Forgetful of where he was, Clifford stood bare-headed and stockstill in the lobby. Mary Regan’s sudden reappearance out of the silence, the vacancy, of six months’ absence, sent his mind flashing over the past, the present, the future, touching in chaotic wonderment the high spots of his strange relationship with her.... Daughter of that one-time famous cynic and famous master criminal, “Gentleman Jim” Regan, dead these five years, she had passed her girlhood in the cynical philosophy of the little court surrounding her father,—had made that philosophy her own,—and, grown into young womanhood, she had joined that great crime entrepreneur, her Uncle Joe Russell, in many of his more subtle enterprises. It was at the beginning of this career that Clifford’s life had come into contact with hers. Police Commissioner Thorne had ordered him[13] to “cover” the pair. From the first Clifford had conceived the idea that her criminal point of view was not an expression of her true nature, but was a habit of mind developed in her by association: and he had proceeded upon the theory that a bigger rôle, than merely to make arrests, would be to arouse the real Mary Regan to her true self.... The conflicts between the two!—her hostility to him!—his ultimate success, or seeming success, when he had broken through her shell of defensive cynicism—and last of all, that parting scene down in Washington Square in the dusk of the on-coming dawn!...

[13]

He lived through that scene for a briefest moment—he was always 

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