The paper rattled a little in his hands. His face flamed, then settled gray and very still. Except that his eyes moved, flashing from the photographs to the headlines, he might have been a man hewn of granite. "One more reason why the Snoqualmie highway should be improved," he read. "Narrow escape of the Morganstein party. Mrs. Weatherbee's presence of mind." And, half-way down the page, "Mrs. Weatherbee modestly assumes an incognito when interviewed by a representative of the Press."
But Tisdale did not look at the story. He crushed the newspaper into the corner of his seat and turned his face to the window. His cigar had gone out. He laid it mechanically on the sill. So, this was the woman who had wrecked David Weatherbee; who had cast her spell over level-headed Foster; and already, in the less than three days he had known her, had made a complete idiot of him. Suppose Foster should hear about that drive through the mountains that had cost him over seven hundred dollars; suppose Foster should know about that episode in the basin on Weatherbee's own ground. A great revulsion came over him.
Presently he began to take up detail after detail of that journey. Now he saw the real impulse that had led her to board the eastbound train in Snoqualmie Pass. She had recognized him, conjectured he was on his way to find that tract of Weatherbee's; and she had determined to go over the land with him, cajole him into putting the highest estimate possible on the property. Even now, there in the sleeper, she was congratulating herself no doubt on the success of her scheme.
At the thought of the ease with which he had allowed himself to be ensnared, his muscles tightened. It was as though the iron in the man took shape, shook off the veneer, encased him like a coat of mail. Hitherto, in those remote Alaska solitudes, this would have meant the calling to account of some transgressor in his camp. He began to sift for the prime element in this woman's wonderful personality. It was not physical beauty alone; neither was it that mysterious magnetism, almost electrical, yet delicately responsive as a stringed instrument. One of these might have kept that tremendous hold on Weatherbee near, but on Weatherbee absent through those long, breaking years, hardly. It was something deeper; something elusive yet insistent that had made it easier for him to brave out his defeat alone in the Alaska wilderness than come back to face. Clearly she was not just the handsome animal he had believed her to be. Had she not called herself proud? Had he not seen her courage? She had a spirit to break. A soul!
CHAPTER XIII
"A LITTLE STREAK OF LUCK"
It was not the first time Jimmie Daniels had entertained the Society Editor at the Rathskeller, and that Monday, though he had invited her to lunch with him in the Venetian room, she asked him, as was her habit, to "order for both."
"Isn't there something special you'd like?" he asked generously; "something you haven't had for a long time?"
"No. You are so much of an epicure—for a literary person—I know it's sure to be something nice. Besides," and the shadow of a smile drifted across her face, "it saves me guessing the state of your finances."
A critic would have called Geraldine Atkins too slender for her height, and her face, notwithstanding its girlish freshness, hardly pretty. The chin, in spite of its dimple, was too strong; the lips, scarlet as a holly berry, lacked fullness and had a trick of closing firmly over her white teeth. Even her gray-blue eyes, which should have been a dreamer's, had acquired a direct intensity of expression as though they were forever seeking the inner, real you. Still, from the rolling brim of her soft felt hat to the hem of her brown tailor-made, that cleared the ankles of trim brown shoes, she was undeniably chic and in the eyes of Jimmie Daniels "mighty nice."