Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/90

 door-sill and held out a tinted form-pad sheet to the operator. The solicitously purring stewardess, at a gesture from her benefactor, had already disappeared.

"You are still sending, are you not?" asked the young woman, stepping still nearer the operating-table.

Her voice betrayed no trace of foreign origin, as McKinnon had at first expected it might. The speech was that of a well-groomed New York girl, the type of girl that McKinnon had so often noted about the Fifth Avenue shops and the theatre lobbies. The voice was the New York voice, yet with a difference. It was the slightest and thinnest substratum of accent, of modulation, that made up this difference. Yet in doing so it imparted to her words a mild and bewitching gentleness of tone that seemed to hint at some indefinably exotic influence of education or environment. It seemed to impart to her the crisp piquancy of the Parisian, persistently yet mysteriously accounting for her birdlike alertness of poise and movement, for some continuous suggestion of schoolgirl youthfulness that belied her actual years. It seemed to convert what he had at first accepted as audacity into fortitude touched with discretion.

"Then you are sending," she said, as though in answer to her own question.