Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/13

 from type. She even puzzled him a little. And he was not a man frequently puzzled by the women he encountered.

Still again he studied her from under drooping and indifferent eyelids. He could see that she had taken off her gloves and rolled them up into a tight ball. Her bare hands were linked together, as she leaned forward with her elbows on the round-topped table, and on the delicate bridgeway of those interwoven fingers rested the perfect oval of her chin.

Of these fingers Kestner took especial notice. For all their slenderness there was a nervous strength about them, an odd fastidiousness of movement, a promise of vast executive capabilities. The mam watching them saw at a glance that they were the fingers of an artist.

Kestner's indolent glance went back to her face. The pallor of that youthful yet ascetic-looking face was accentuated by the dark brim of the hat under the bird of paradise plumes. The violet-blue eyes, at the moment almost as sleepy-looking as Kestner's, were made darker by the heavy fringe of their lashes. Yet there seemed nothing suppressed or circuitous in their outlook on the world.

Kestner, in fact, could find no fault with the modelling of the face. It should have had more colour, he might have admitted, yet the ivory creaminess of the skin seemed to atone for that absence of colour. The dull chestnut of the heavily massed hair would have been more effective if done in the mode of the hour—but even that, he concluded, was a matter of taste.

It seemed, on the whole, a face singularly devoid