Jimmie Dale smiled in the darkness.
"Jason!"
"Yes, sir."
"I wish you to remain where you are, without leaving that chair, for the
next ten minutes." He moved across the room to the door. "Good-night,
Jason," he said.
"Good-night, Master Jim--good-night, sir--oh, Lord!"
Jimmie Dale did not require that ten minutes; it was a very wide margin
of safety to obviate the possibility of Jason, from a window, detecting
the exit of a disreputable character from the house--in three minutes
he was turning the corner of the first cross street and walking rapidly
away from Riverside Drive.
In the subway station Jimmie Dale read the letter--read it twice over,
as he always read those strange epistles of hers that opened the door to
new peril, new danger to the Gray Seal, but too, that seemed somehow to
draw tighter, in a glad, big way, the unseen bond between them; read it,
as he always read those letters, almost subconsciously committing the
very words to memory with that keen faculty of brain of his. But now
as he began to tear the sheet and envelope into minute particles, a
strained, hard look was on his face and in his eyes, and his lips, half
parted, moved a little.
"It's a death warrant," muttered Jimmie Dale. "I--I guess to-night will
see the end of the Gray Seal. She says I needn't do it, but I guess it's
worth the risk--a human life!"
A downtown express roared into the station.
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