Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/285

Rh Susan's elder eyes hovered, in the same way, through her elegant glass, at his purified haunt. 'He's gone. And how,' she insisted, 'did you do it?'

'Why, you dear goose,'—Miss Amy spoke a little strangely,—'I went to Paris.'

'To Paris?'

'To see what I could bring back—that I mightn't, that I shouldn't. To do a stroke with!' Miss Amy brought out.

But it left her friend still vague. 'A stroke?'

'To get through the Customs—under their nose.'

It was only with this that, for Miss Susan, a pale light dawned. 'You wanted to smuggle? That was your idea?'

'It was his,' said Miss Amy. He wanted no "conscience-money" spent for him,' she now more bravely laughed; 'it was quite the other way about—he wanted some bold deed done, of the old wild kind; he wanted some big risk taken. And I took it.' She sprang up, rebounding, in her triumph.

Her companion, gasping, gazed at her. 'Might they have hanged you too?'

Miss Amy looked up at the dim stars. 'If I had defended myself. But luckily it didn't come to that. What I brought in I brought'—she rang out, more and more lucid, now, as she talked—'triumphantly. To appease him—I braved them. I chanced it, at Dover, and they never knew.'

'Then you hid it?'

'About my person.'

With the shiver of this Miss Susan got up, and they stood there duskily together. 'It was so small?' the elder lady wonderingly murmured.

'It was big enough to have satisfied him,' her mate replied with just a shade of sharpness. 'I chose it, with much thought, from the forbidden list.'

The forbidden list hung a moment in Miss Susan's eyes, suggesting to her, however, but a pale conjecture. 'A Tauchnitz?'