Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/250

 the dubious triumph of beholding the one man in all the world she had the least desire to see. For Shindler and Strasser, she very well knew, were one and the same man.

If for a moment Sadie shrank unconsciously back between her fellow-travelers, at the sight of that disturbingly familiar figure, her scrutiny of the gentleman in question was none the less pointed.

Three years, she noticed, had worked considerable change with him, more than her study of Kestner's Washington snapshot had led her to anticipate. He had plainly lost a ponderable part of his old-time jauntiness. His air of innocuous perkiness seemed no longer a part of him. It appeared more like a mask, put on to conceal the fact that he was a hounded and harried man uncertain of the future. He now wore eye-glasses, she saw, a pair of tortoise-shell "blinkers" which further dissimilated his true appearance by giving him an air of owlish preoccupation. That beguiling and half-scholarly stoop of his was more accentuated than of old, and as he moved along the crowded platform carrying a yellow hand-bag stained with grease he seemed merely an innocuous and neutral-tinted citizen