Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/201

 It took an effort for Kestner to retain his pose of impersonality.

"What terms?" he quietly inquired.

"That is what we must decide on," she said in the same tone of solemn candour.

"Why?" demanded her visitor, still fencing for time.

"Because I can't go on like this," she replied, with a listlessly tragic movement of the hands; "nothing can go on like this!"

"I know it," was Kestner's quiet retort.

She did not resent any note of triumph that may have been in his voice. Her brow still wore its look of troubled thought.

"It isn't you that I'm afraid of," she announced, the abstraction of her tone taking all sting from the statement.

"Then what is it?" he asked, lamenting the fact that he could not see her face.

"It's myself," she answered after a moment's hesitation. "I can't go on with this. I've got to get away from it all!" The violet-blue eyes were once more courageously meeting Kestner's unparticipating stare. "You remember what you told me in Palermo? How father and I could never keep on at this sort of work, how it must go from bad to worse, and always lead to one end, and only one end? Well, that is the way it is leading. I always tried to tell myself that money would be a protection. To do what we were doing seemed terrible only when it implied poverty and terror and flight from one corner to another. We always had money enough to keep