"Oh, you needn't try to come it over me with words!" Capper's teeth showed in a nasty grin as his rage flared back from the first suppression of surprise. "I've come here to have a settlement for a little affair between you and me."
"Blackmail? Why, Billy Capper, how true to form you run!" The yellow-brown eyes were alight and burning now. "Have you determined the sum you want or are you in the open market?"
Capper grinned again, and shifted his weight, inadvertently advancing one foot a little nearer the seated girl as he did so.
"Pretty quick with the tongue—as always," he sneered. "But this time it doesn't go, Louisa. You pay differently this time—pay for selling me out. Understand!" Again one foot shifted forward a few inches by the accident of some slight body movement on the man's part. Louisa still sat before her dressing mirror, hands carelessly crossed on her lap.
"Selling you out?" she repeated evenly. "Oh! So you finally did discover that you were elected to be the goat? Brilliant Capper! How long before you made up your mind you had a grievance?"
The girl's cool admission goaded the little man's fury to frenzy. His mind craved for action—for the leap and the tightening of fingers around that taunting throat; but somehow his body, strangely detached from the fiat of volition as if it were another's body, lagged to the command. Violence had never been its mission; muscles were slow to accept this new conception of the mind. But the man's feet followed their crafty intelligence; by fractions of inches they moved forward stealthily.
"You wouldn't be here now," Louisa coldly went on, "if you weren't fortune's bright-eyed boy. You were slated to be taken off the boat at Malta and shot; the boat didn't stop at Malta through no fault of ours, and so you arrived at Alexandria—and became a nuisance." One of the girl's hands lifted from her lap and lazily played along the edge of the rosewood standard which supported the mirror on the dressing table. It stopped at a curiously carved rosette in the rococo scroll-work. Capper's suspicious eye noted the movement. He sparred for time—the time needed by those stealthy feet to shorten the distance between themselves and the girl.
"Why," he hissed, "why did you give me a number with the Wilhelmstrasse and send me to Alexandria if I was to be caught and shot at Malta? That's what I'm here to find out."
"Excellent Capper!" Her fingers were playing with the convolutions of the carved rosette. "Intelligent Capper! He comes to a lady's room at night to find the answer to a simple question. He shall have it. He evidently does not know the method of the Wilhelmstrasse, which is to choose two men for every task to be accomplished. One—the 'target,' we call him—goes first; our friends whose secrets we seek are allowed to become suspicious of him—we even give them a hint to help them in their suspicion. They seize the 'target,' and in time of war he becomes a real target for a firing squad, as you should have been, Capper, at Malta. Then when our friends believe they have nipped our move in the bud follows the second man—who turns the trick."
Capper was still wrestling with that baffling stubbornness of the body. Each word the girl uttered was like vitriol on his writhing soul. His mind willed murder—willed it with all the strength of hate; but still the springs of his body were cramped—by what? Not cowardice, for he was beyond reckoning results. Certainly not compassion or any saving virtue of chivalry. Why did his eyes constantly stray to that white hand lifted to allow the fingers to play with the filigree of wood on the mirror support?