Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/80

 that by the quickened colour, by the full under-lip of a mouth that was warm but not yielding, by the immediate and open challenge of the translucent eye. But he decided, now that the chance he had been waiting for had come, to tell her what he felt it his duty to tell her.

"You can't go on with this work," he said, quite simply.

She looked at him with wonder in her quiet stare. "I'm compelled to go on with this work," she retorted, speaking as quietly as he had spoken.

"How can you?" he inquired. He felt that he must be very foolish-looking, in the transparencies of his outlandish make-up. He was conscious of being at a disadvantage, of having suffered a loss of dignity, of standing a sorry figure for the utterance of the things he most wanted to say.

"How can you?" he repeated.

Her face suddenly grew quite white; she sat arrested in a pose where some new thought had struck her. Then she reached down and opened one of the drawers at her side.

Kestner could not see what she held in her hand. He arrived at his own conclusions. But he did not change his position.

"I could shoot you!" she said, with the same even calmness with which she had spoken before.

He noticed that her right hand moved forward. But he did not change his position. He merely decided that he knew his woman.

"On the contrary, you are altogether afraid to," was his tranquil-noted rejoinder.