Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/257

 obviously drew closer to the woman he was addressing. "Listen to me, my girl," and his voice was lower and more rasping as he went on. "You can't change your spots or jump your gang over-night. I'm not going to haggle about the past. But we're both cornered here, and we've both got a chance for a get-away. Wait—listen to me. We can get down to Colon or perhaps Port Limon, and strike up to San Jose. Then we can work Rio and Pemambuco and Buenos Ayres until things straighten out. Inside of two years, we can slip back to Europe, and by that time you can have enough to go where you like, and stay where you like."

"Enough what?"

There was something akin to pity in her voice as she put that question to him. It accentuated, to the listening Kestner, the essential difference in their natures, the one accepting without protest or revolt a condition of life which must always stand odious to the other.

"Enough hard cash," was Lambert's reply. "Enough to keep you going the way it kept you going in the past, that gave you the best in the land, no matter how I had to scheme and plot for it."

"I am not thinking of the past. I cannot think of it. What I'm thinking of is the future. And my problems are not the kind hard cash, as you call it, can solve."

"Ha, you'll sing another tune when the hard cash isn't where you want it."

"I shall thank God for the chance," was her devout rejoinder.