“Go on, Mr. Cray,” she directed him, meantime looking at him with eyes full of a haunting fear, “what is it?”
Cray had a sudden, insane feeling that he would give all he was worth for the pleasure of removing that look of fear, then commanding himself to behave, he said,
“I am sorry, Miss Austin, but I must ask you some unpleasant questions.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said, with the ghost of a smile on her curved red lips, and, smoothing down her taffeta lap, she demurely clasped her sensitive little hands and waited.
Those hands bothered Cray. Though they lay quietly, he felt that at his speech they would flutter in anxiety—even in fear, and he was loath to disturb them.
Because of this hesitancy, he plunged in more abruptly than he meant to do.
“Where do you come from, Miss Austin?”
“New York City,” she said, a brighter look coming to her face, as if she thought the ordeal would not be so terrible after all.
“What address there?”
“One West Sixty-seventh Street.”