Page:Biggers and Ritchie - Inside the Lines.djvu/181

 to form you run!" The yellow-brown eyes were alight and burning now. "Have you determined the sum you want or are you in the open market?"

Capper grinned again, and shifted his weight, inadvertently advancing one foot a little nearer the seated girl as he did so.

"Pretty quick with the tongue—as always," he sneered. "But this time it doesn't go, Louisa. You pay differently this time—pay for selling me out. Understand!" Again one foot shifted forward a few inches by the accident of some slight body movement on the man's part. Louisa still sat before her dressing mirror, hands carelessly crossed on her lap.

"Selling you out?" she repeated evenly. "Oh! So you finally did discover that you were elected to be the goat? Brilliant Capper! How long before you made up your mind you had a grievance?"

The girl's cool admission goaded the little man's fury to frenzy. His mind craved for action—for the leap and the tightening of fingers around that taunting throat; but somehow his body, strangely detached from the fiat of volition as if it were another's body, lagged