Page:Guy Boothby - The Beautiful White Devil.djvu/61

 "Do you know, Dr. De Normanville, I want to make you like me, I want you to forget, if you can,—while you are with us, at any rate,—the stories you have heard about me. Some day, perhaps, I will attempt to show you that I am not altogether as bad as people have painted me."

For the moment I was so completely carried away by her outburst of girlish frankness that I hardly knew what to say.

"'Pon my soul, I really don't believe you are!" I blurted out, like a schoolboy.

"Thank you for that, at least," she said, smiling at my earnestness; and then, making me a little curtsey, she turned and disappeared through the door by which she had first entered the saloon.

Putting my case into my pocket, I looked round the room once more, and then went up on deck, not knowing what to think. It seemed impossible to believe that this frank, beautiful girl, whose eyes were so steady and true, whose voice had such a genuine, hearty ring in it, could be the notorious criminal of whom all the East was talking. And yet without a shadow of a doubt it was so. And if it came to that, what was I, staid, respectable George De Normanville, doing, but aiding and abetting her in her nefarious career? True, I might salve my conscience with the knowledge that I had been drawn into it unconsciously, and was only acting in the interests of humanity but it was nevertheless a fact, and one that I could not have disputed if I had wanted to, that I was the paid servant of the Beautiful White Devil.

It was just two bells in the first dog watch when I