Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/104

 And Count Eckstrom bore himself like a thoroughbred, proffering a hand with such deference as he would have shown at meeting a cabinet minister, whereas Henry Harrington looked like a bandaged and bearded hang-over from some all-night debauch. Noblesse oblige. Henry must take it. He found it soft, albeit with sinews of steel.

"Pleased, I'm sure!" Harrington declared, and he really was—pleased as the trailing hound when for an instant he sights the fox.

"Most happy!" professed the nobleman with a bend from the hips and a smile that was wide and toothful, yet, to Henry's eye, expressionless as the grin of an opossum.

"And have you known Count Eckstrom long, Miss Boland?" he inquired, as with suave courtesy.

"Oh, ages and ages!" sparkled Billie, with a light of favor in the glance she bent upon the Count, which made Harrington hate him the more. "I met him three months ago in Paris, and two months ago in London and one month ago in New York; and to my surprise ran across him in Seattle last week where he had entrenched at the New Washington after traipsing up and down through our Northwest, looking at mountains and waterfalls, whipping out salmon waters and trying, I believe, even a cougar hunt. Four meetings—in four worlds—that makes us old acquaintances, doesn't it?"

The Count bowed a flattered assent, lifting his silk topper gravely.

"She doesn't know a darned thing about him," perceived Henry, thinking lightning-fast. "He's a crook—maybe one of these international and cosmopolitan