The little spy was choking with a lust to kill; his whole body trembled under the pulse of a murderous passion. He had found Louisa--the girl who had sold him out--and for her private ends, Capper made no doubt of that. Some day he had hoped to run her down, and with his fingers about her soft throat to tell her how dangerous it was to trick Billy Capper. But to have her flung across his path this way when anger was still at white heat in him--this was luck! He'd see this Louisa and have a little powwow with her even if he had to break his way into the house.
Capper felt the doorknob again; the door wouldn't yield. He drew back a bit and looked up at the front of the house. Just a dingy black wall with three unlighted windows set in it irregularly. The roof projected over the gabled attic like the visor of a cap. Beyond the farther corner of the house were ten feet of garden space, and then the bold rock of the cliff springing upward. A low wall bounded the garden; over its top nodded the pale ghosts of moonflowers and oleanders.
Capper was over the wall in a bound, and crouching amid flower clusters, listening for possible alarm. None came, and he became bolder. Skirting a tiny arbor, he skulked to a position in the rear of the house; there a broad patch of illumination stretched across the garden, coming from two French windows on the lower floor. They stood half open; through the thin white stuff hanging behind them Capper could see vaguely the figure of a girl seated before a dressing mirror with her hands busy over two heavy ropes of hair. Nothing to do but step up on the little half balcony outside the windows, push through into the room, and--have a little powwow with Louisa.
An unwonted boldness had a grip on the little spy. Never a person to force a face-to-face issue when the trick could be turned behind somebody's back, he was, nevertheless, driven irresistibly by a furious anger that took no heed of consequences.
With the light foot of a cat, Capper straddled the low rail of the balcony, pushed back one of the partly opened windows, and stepped into Louisa's room. His eyes registered mechanically the details--a heavy canopied bed, a massive highboy of some dark wood, chairs supporting carelessly flung bits of wearing apparel. But he noted especially that just as he emerged from behind one of the loose curtains a white arm remained poised over a brown head.