The Shadow

BY ARTHUR STRINGER
NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1913
Copyright, 1913, by The Century Co. Published, January, 1913
Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound’s eyes as the door opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.
“Hello, Elsie!” he said, without looking at her.
The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfully toward his table desk.
“Hello, Jim!” she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner’s office.
The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll of her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desk top.
“You sent for me,” the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than a question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of timidity. The woman’s pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense of power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of beauty, though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so wistful as hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing, had not a little to do with the woman’s achieved serenity. There was nothing outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always left her doubly dangerous as a law-breaker.
Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of lethargic beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his head and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows. He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing pupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to the brain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimes the whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according to the light.