“Me? I think no game stupid that once I have started—no, not one. Then I must play it through to the end, or count myself defeated!”
Fair’s eyes darkened ominously.
“But you don’t start many games, do you?” she asked.
“No,” acquiesced the young man in the chair. “As you say, not many.”
Fair set her teeth. Did he think that if he continued to sprawl all his splendid length there, unmoving, that she would pass on? Was this his method of once more conveying to her the information that her presence was an intrusion? Oh, for a man—for some slim, freckled, young American—to take this insolent foreigner by his coat collar and jerk him to his unworthy feet! Perhaps it might be better to have two of them—he was disgustingly tall. She swung round the corner of the chair, flames dancing in her eyes.
“Are you—very busy?” she inquired in a dangerously polite little voice.
Philippe le Gai showed all of his white teeth in another flashing smile.
“But no!” he replied accurately, and made a swift motion as though to rise, only to check himself more swiftly. “Be seated, I pray you!”
The look of consuming rage that Fair flashed on him as she seated herself in the small iron chair opposite him would have shrivelled a normally sensitive soul to gray ashes. Her impervious host, however, merely leaned deeper into his bright cushions, the smile still edging his lips.
“Laure still plays?”