Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/415

 "but . . ." And then, while Harrington held him madly by the shoulders, shaking the story out of him, urging continually, "Yes, yes; go on, man; go on!" the jailor told him all about it.

"Oh, my God!" breathed Harrington like a prayer of thanksgiving, as he pushed White from him. "Why, then, she—she did care for me—enough to come for me at the first sign of any immediate danger." He stood a moment drinking in the significance of what he had heard, a wondrous smile of heart-happiness forming on his lips, the lines in his face filling, his figure straightening, his head going up as he adjusted himself to the perception that she had loved him all the while and that there must be some key that furnished a satisfying solution of her conduct.

"Billie!" he trumpeted exultingly, his voice breaking with the sheer weight of its joy into something mellow and marvelously revealing of the depths of his passion for the girl. "Bil-lie!" and it seemed as if he were calling to her, far away in Humboldt House.

"White, you blundering old coot, you! Why didn't you tell me this before?" he demanded, at the same time reaching for his hat, when there came a tap on the locked door, faint and muffled, as from a gloved knuckle. The two men exchanged inquiring glances in a kind of strained silence. "Now, what the" White started to ejaculate, then felt his way noiselessly around the table to the door and opened it.

Pale and perturbed, Billie Boland stood there—in her shapeless tweed coat, in her little cloth hat, the brim of which had been pulled moodily low but was now alertly up; and out from under it her blue pain-filled eyes gazed in doubt and fear, wonder and glory