Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/347

327 "Not Michael?" she demanded, with a quick cloud of distrust on her wilful young brow.

"No, it was the man that your Michael has promised to kill!" I retorted.

She didn't seem to understand me.

"But you're all so mistaken about Michael," she complained. "He isn't that type of man. He's nobler than that. He doesn't take lives; he saves them!"

I stared at her, suddenly realizing the gulf that yawned between us. There was, I felt, no bridge of human understanding that could even span that gulf. To argue with her would be too much like trying to powwow with the planet Mars.

I wakened to the fact that I was wasting time with a moon-struck ingénue when just outside those walls of cream and gold the stern realities of an uncommonly stern world were waiting for me. Clarissa Rhinelander Bartlett, I saw, was in for a jolt or two. But some one else, I felt, would have to face the problem of opening that young lady's eyes. I had no intention of ruffling her swan's-down. I felt too much like the Brussels ball when the first cannons of Waterloo started to boom, to sit any longer in that chair.

"What are you going to do?" demanded the girl,