Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/12

 shine like gold. The same sun glinted pleasantly through the leaves of a sycamore. It shone on motor-busses threading their way through the heart of Paris. It shone on tonneaux in which lounged painted actresses and on taxicabs in which sat tired-eyed tourists. It shone on promenading sidewalk-throngs and red-trousered Zouaves and bare-headed students in black gowns and pastry-boys with trays balanced on their heads and a street-tumbler with a mat under his arm and a haggard-browed old man in frugal search of cigarette-ends along the boulevarde curbing.

Kestner, while his mousse au chocolat deliquesced on the little iron table in front of him, saw all this. But incidentally, and as though by accident, he saw other things. Among these was the woman in the bird of paradise hat.

He sat watching her as his many years in the service had taught him always to watch his quarry, with that casual and intermittent glance, with that discreet obliquity, which could so easily be interpreted as the idle curiosity of an idle-minded sightseer.

Yet Kestner, at the moment, was anything but idle-minded. At each apparently casual side-glance his quick eye was picking up some new point, very much as a magnet catches up its iron filings.

"So that's our woman!" he finally murmured. He spoke without emotion.

Yet he was a little startled, inwardly, by her appearance of youthfulness. At the outside, he concluded, she could not be more than twenty-two or twenty-three. That was younger than most of them. In other ways, too, he saw that she was a distinct