It was
always the same--always! For years she had eluded him like that, come
upon him without warning and disappeared, but leaving always that
tangible proof of her existence--a letter, the call of the Gray Seal to
arms. But to-night it was as it had never been before. It was not alone
baffled chagrin now, not alone the longing, the wild desire to see her
face, to look into her eyes--it was life and death. She had come at the
very moment when she, perhaps alone of all the world, could have pointed
the way out, when life, liberty, everything that was common to them both
was at stake, in deadly peril--and she had gone, ignorant of it all,
leaving him staggered by the very possibility of the succour that was
held up before his eyes only to be snatched away without power of his to
grasp it. His intuition had not been at fault--he had made no mistake
in that shadow across the street from the Sanctuary. It had been the
Tocsin. He had been followed; and it was she who had followed him,
until, in a crowd, she had seized the opportunity of a moment ago.
Though ultimately, perhaps, it changed nothing, it was a relief in a way
to know that it was she, not Whitey Mack, who had been lurking there;
but her persistent, incomprehensible determination to preserve the
mystery with which she surrounded herself was like now to cost them both
a ghastly price.
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