Page:Yellow Claw 1920.djvu/269

 “You excite my curiosity,” she said. “Don’t you think”—turning to Denise Ryland—“he is most tantalizing?”

Denise Ryland distended her nostrils scornfully.

“He is telling…fairy tales,” she declared. “He thinks…we are…silly!”

“On the contrary,” declared Gianapolis; “I flatter myself that I am too good a judge of character to make that mistake.”

Helen Cumberly absorbed his entire attention; in everything he sought to claim her interest; and when, ere taking their departure, the girl and her friend walked around the studio to view the other pictures, Gianapolis was the attendant cavalier, and so well as one might judge, in his case, his glance rarely strayed from the piquant beauty of Helen.

When they departed, it was Gianapolis, and not Olaf van Noord, who escorted them to the door and downstairs to the street. The red lips of the Eurasian smiled upon her circle of adulators, but her eyes—her unfathomable eyes—followed every movement of the Greek.