Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/200

 taint, the inconsequential word or move that marked them as demimondaine, the over-acted gentility that proved as obvious, in the end, as the paper roses of stagedom.

"You should not have come here," she said, after several moments of thought.

"Why not?" demanded Kestner.

"Because it is dangerous," was her answer.

"For whom?"

There was a touch of cynicism in his smile, but she chose to disregard it. Her brow did not lose its look of troubled thought.

"For you," she answered.

"But not for you?" he inquired.

"For both of us," she amended. He won a thin and wintry pleasure from the thought that they were bracketed together, if only by peril.

"Then why did you send for me?" was his next question.

There was a shadow of reproof in her eyes at the obliquity of that inquiry.

"I did not send for you," she reminded him. "I asked to come to you."

"For what reason?"

Her eyes were again studying his face. He was struck by both their fearlessness and their lack of guile. That strange life of hers, he felt, must have beaten down those flimsier reticences and privacies of sex behind which youth, as a rule, sat with its illusions.

"I wanted to see if we could possibly come to terms," she finally announced.