Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/176

 of which she was so inordinately proud. Then having digested her victory, she looked up at Andelman.

"I'd rather pick me choose," she demurred, with one rounded arm still stretched languidly out across the table. Her fingers were within six inches of the innocent-looking vase before the waiter, for all his celerity of movement, could interpose.

"Pardon, madame," he murmured as he stooped over the table. Yet as he did so he crowded in so close to the girl's forward-bent body that she was compelled to shrink back into her chair.

"You will find Alphonse's taste irreproachable," said Andelman, once more able to smile.

Sadie did not answer him, for at the moment her mind was occupied with the drama in front of her. Kestner, she saw, had not moved. He merely sat viewing her with a casual indifference touched with amusement. Wilsnach, it is true, looked about him a little puzzled, but to be puzzled was habitual with the interrogative-souled man from the Paris office.

Andelman was the man! That much the voice of Sadie's instincts at once proclaimed to her. It was Andelman who had promptly betrayed the tension under which her maneuver had placed him. It was Andelman who, for all his pose of care-free