After all, he had known it in his heart of hearts
all the time--it had always been the same--it was only one more occasion
added to the innumerable ones that had gone before in which she had
eluded him!
And now--there was the letter! Automatically he quickened his steps a
little. It was useless, futile, profitless, for the moment, at least, to
disturb himself over his failure--there was the letter! His lips parted
in a strange, half-serious, half-speculative smile. The letter--that
was paramount now. What new venture did the night hold in store for
him? What sudden emergency was the Gray Seal called upon to face this
time--what role, unrehearsed, without warning, must he play? What story
of grim, desperate rascality would the papers credit him with
when daylight came? Or would they carry in screaming headlines the
announcement that the Gray Seal was caged and caught at last, and in
three-inch type tell the world that the Gray Seal was--Jimmie Dale!
A block down, he turned from Broadway out of the theatre crowds that
streamed in both directions past him. The letter! Almost feverishly
now he was seeking an opportunity to open and read it unobserved; an
eagerness upon him that mingled exhilaration at the lure of danger
with a sense of premonition that, irritably, inevitably was with him
at moments such as these. It seemed, it always seemed, that, with an
unopened letter of hers in his possession, it was as though he were
about to open a page in the Book of Fate and read, as it were, a
pronouncement upon himself that might mean life or death.
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