"I believed you an American but a gentleman; it appears that, if you ever were the latter, you've fallen so low that you willingly cast your lot with thieves."
Having exhausted his repertoire of rudenesses, Kirkwood took to twiddling his thumbs.
"I want to ask you if you think it fair to me or my son, to leave us in ignorance of the place where you are to meet the thieves who stole our--my son's jewels?"
"Mrs. Hallam," he said soberly, "if I am going to meet Mr. Calendar or Mr. Mulready, I have no assurance of that fact."
There was only the briefest of pauses, during which she analyzed this; then, quickly, "But you hope to?" she snapped.
He felt that the only adequate retort to this would be a shrug of his shoulders; doubted his ability to carry one off; and again took refuge in silence.
The woman abandoned a second plan of siege, with a readiness that did credit to her knowledge of mankind. She thought out the next very carefully, before opening with a masked battery.
"Mr. Kirkwood, can't we be friends--this aside?"
"Nothing could please me more, Mrs. Hallam!"
"Last night, when you cut away so suddenly, you prevented my making you a proposal, a sort of a business proposition...."
"Yes; I understood. But this morning, when you've had time to think it over--?"
"I have no choice in the matter, Mrs. Hallam." The green eyes darkened ominously. "You mean--I am to understand, then, that you're against us, that you prefer to side with swindlers and scoundrels, all because of a--"
She discovered him eying her with a smile of such inscrutable and sardonic intelligence, that the words died on her lips, and she crimsoned, treasonably to herself. For he saw it; and the belief he had conceived while attending to her tissue of fabrication, earlier that morning, was strengthened to the point of conviction that, if anything had been stolen by anybody, Mrs. Hallam and her son owned it as little as Calendar.
As for the woman, she felt she had steadily lost, rather than gained, ground; and the flash of anger that had colored her cheeks, lit twin beacons in her eyes, which she resolutely fought down until they faded to mere gleams of resentment and determination. But she forgot to control her lips; and they are the truest indices to a woman's character and temperament; and Kirkwood did not overlook the circumstance that their specious sweetness had vanished, leaving them straight, set and hard, quite the reverse of attractive.