Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/207

 father had been working for. But when I say that, too, you can't believe me, can you?"

"I wish I could," Kestner admitted. He found himself speaking with an earnestness of which on second thought he felt slightly ashamed. He was still torturing his soul with the query as to how much of all she said was genuine and how much was trickery. He could indulge in none of the exultation of a combatant who finds his adversary in an extremity. Her predicament, if such it were, brought him no sense of personal triumph. Yet as he glanced about that dingy and disordered room and then back at the pale oval of her face he felt reassured of the fact that she was ill-suited to the setting in which he had found her. She still impressed him as being intrinsically too fine of fibre for the life of the social free-booter. But he could not forget the fact that she was Paul Lambert's daughter and the agent through whom that master-criminal had planned to debauch a nation's currency.

They sat there, facing each other in one of those pregnant silences which sometimes come when wide issues are at stake. Kestner remembered that she was beleaguering him with none of the artifices of sex. There was something almost judicial in her impassivity, as though her case had been put and her last word had been said. And in that very abnegation of appeal, he felt, she was circuitously assailing his will and breaking down his resolution.

She must have caught from his eyes some vague look of capitulation, for she raised her head, as though