Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/199

 his call had been a social one. Yet he wondered just why she should have this power of restraining and intimidating him. In work such as his there was little room for the finer issues of life, and he had long since learned not to be overcourteous to an enemy.

The sudden consciousness that he was treating her with a consideration which she as his quarry had done nothing to merit made him more watchful of eye and more wary of movement. He resented the higher plane to which she still had the power of coercing him, even while he prayed that she would not confound his inward belief in her.

Before seating himself, however, he moved his chair back until it stood against the wall of the room. This was an announcement, he knew, of his latent distrust in her and her motives. Yet the movement seemed lost on her, though Kestner reminded himself that in the past she had proved herself a capable enough actress. He even wondered, as he gazed about those small and dingy chambers, how often the antique games of blackmail had been played between their faded walls. He also pondered the fact that she would be an especially valuable woman at such work, with her incongruous air of purity and other-worldliness, her undeniable beauty, her almost boy-like unconcern of sex.

Yet the next movement, as he looked back at the intent face with its inapposite flower-like appeal, he resented the very thought of her as a pawn in anything so sordid as the panel-game. It was unbelievable. He had seen too many of those ladies of draggled plumes and their meretricious assumptions of grandeur. About them all had been the betraying