Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/200

188 "They were until I met you." And I rounded up boldness enough to look right at him as I said it.

"Then for the second time I've been able to help you," he said, with his quiet smile.

I nodded my head. His face looked stern, for a moment. The only thing that made it relax was my gesture of dignified disdain when his Jap servant held a cigarette-box of chased silver in front of me.

"So you're not that sort of girl either?" said the man across the table from me.

"I hope not," I said. I said it with all the dignity that I could command. Shocking one's Hero-Man with the eye-opening phrases of the underworld seemed very different to shocking him by one's actions.

"My sister-in-law, the duchess, does about forty of 'em a day!" he dolefully acknowledged. Most families, I remembered, had a skeleton or two in their closets.

"I wasn't brought up that way," I rather stiffly announced. And I looked up quickly to see whether or not he was laughing at me. But his face, as far as I could make out, was quite sober.

"We never are," was his somewhat puzzling reply. But I edged away from that subject, for we seemed to be skating on pretty thin ice.