She thought of the scene she had witnessed, the girl sitting sideways on
Stafford Orme's horse, and her face flushed for an instant.
"Are you sure?" she said.
"Quite!" he responded, confidently. "I know all Stafford's flirtations, great and small: if there was anything serious he would tell me; and as he hasn't—there isn't."
She laughed; the slow, soft laugh which made Howard think suddenly, strangely, of a sleepy tigress he had once watched in a rajah's zoo, as she lay basking in the sun: a thing of softness and beauty and—death.
"We've had a most amusing conversation, Mr. Howard," she said. "I don't know when I've been so interested—or so tempted."
"Tempted?" He looked at her with a slow, expectant smile.
"Oh, yes," she murmured, turning her eyes upon him with a half-mocking light in them. "You have forgotten that you have been talking to a woman."
"I don't deny it," he said. "It's the finest compliment I could pay you. But—after?"
"And that to a woman your account of your hero-friend is—a challenge."
He nodded and paused, with his cigar half-way to his lips.