"Don't bother about it any more.
It will be all right.

You can expect me when you see me.

Good-night." He hung the receiver on the hook, walked out of the booth, and mechanically reached the street.
All right! It was far from "all right"-- very far from it.

It was no trivial thing, that letter; they never had been trivial things, those letters of hers, that involved so often a matter of life and death--as this one now, perhaps, as her actions would seem to indicate, involved life and death more urgently than any that had gone before.

It was far from all right--at a moment when his own position, his own safety, was at best but a desperate chance; when his every energy, brain, wit, and cunning were taxed to the utmost to save himself! And yet, somehow, some way, at any cost, he must get that letter--and at any cost he must act upon it! To fail her was to fail utterly in everything that failure in its most miserable, its widest sense, implied--failure in that which rose paramount to every other consideration in life! Fail her! Jimmie Dale's lips thinned into a hard, drawn line--and then parted slowly in a curiously whimsical smile.