Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/409

Rh his self-respect when he can't shave for weeks at a time."

The pretty girl at Tempest's side looked up at him. Mrs. Ferrars had placed her there in order that she should.

"Fancy thinking of that in such a strenuous life. How wonderful you are," she sighed.

"I know," admitted Tempest. "But so few people recognise it. I have to be Bowdlerised for ordinary conversation, you see."

"He means that the person who hasn't been there only understands and commends us for the obvious things," interpreted Bolton, who was an Inspector himself. "And they are never the things that are of any consequence."

"Oh," murmured a soft voice on Tempest's other side, "Clothes, for instance."

"My dear Christine," Mrs. Ferrars laughed. "We women and our ideas don't count on the outside edges of things."

"I mean to count," said Christine. She glanced up at Tempest with a spark of challenge in her dark eyes. "Are sweethearts and wives among the deprivations which you men of the police can bear with equanimity?" she demanded.

Tempest knew her for the wife of a young Englishman who had just entered the Force. It was suspected that he had done it for the sake of excitement, and that he would not stay in it long. He smiled quietly.

"You must ask someone who is better qualified to give an opinion," he said. "In poetical phraseology I happen to be wedded to my work, and so I have all I want of life, you see."

The young eyes questioned his a moment longer, and he bore the look unflinchingly. It was the stand he meant to take all his life through now. But he was relieved when the two women were gone. Good wine, and a good cigar, and the talk and voices of the men of his own class were very comforting to him after the five strait years of naked necessities only.

A little later the name of Ducane came up. Tempest was known to be connected with the case, and Bolton asked questions.