CHAPTER VI.
THE WOMAN SPEAKS "Ssssh!" said the woman under her breath, as she clutched Durkin's arm.
He shook her hand off, impatiently, although the act seemed at cross-purposes with his own will.
"But you--here!" he still gasped.
"Oh, Jim!" she half-moaned, inadequately.

Yet an _aura_ of calmness seemed to surround her.

So great was his own excitement that the words burst from him of their own will, apparently, and sounded like the utterance of a voice not his own.
"What's it mean! How'd you get here ?" He could hear her shuddering, indrawn sigh.
"What, in the name of heaven, do _you_ want in here?
Why don't you speak ?" There was a moment of unbroken silence.

For the first time it seemed to come home to him that this woman who confronted him was his own wife, in the flesh and blood.
"What are _you_ doing here ?" she demanded at last.
He responded, even in his mood of hot antagonism, to some note of ever-sustained appeal about her.

Even through the black gloom that blanketed and blinded him some phantasmal and sub-conscious medium, like the imaginary circuit of a multiplex telegraph system, seemed to carry to his mind some secondary message, some thought that she herself had not uttered.