Page:Mary Rinehart - Man in Lower Ten.djvu/78

 watching her changing expression. I had spoken two dozen words to her and already I felt that I knew the lights and shades in her voice,—I, who had always known how a woman rode to hounds, and who never could have told the color of her hair.

I stepped down on the ties and turned to assist her, and together we walked back to where the conductor and the porter from our car were in close conversation. Instinctively my hand went to my cigarette pocket and came out empty. She saw the gesture.

"If you want to smoke, you may," she said. "I have a big cousin who smokes all the time. He says I am 'kippered.'" I drew out the gun-metal cigarette case and opened it. But this most commonplace action had an extraordinary result: the girl beside me stopped dead still and stood staring at it with fascinated eyes.

"Is—where did you get that?" she demanded, with a catch in her voice; her gaze still fixed on the cigarette case.

"Then you haven't heard the rest of the