When it was finished he translated it laboriously into the department code. But after the copy was made and signed he did not ring at once for a messenger. Instead, he put the two, the original and the cipher, under a paper-weight and sat glooming at them, as if they had been his own death-warrant—was still so sitting when a light tap at the door was followed by a soft swishing of silken skirts, a faint odor of crushed violets, and Genevieve Cortwright stood beside him.
XVII
The Circean Cup
While one might count ten the silence of the upper room remained unbroken, and neither the man nor the woman spoke. It was not the first time by many that Genevieve Cortwright had come to stand beside the engineer's desk, holding him with smiling eyes and a charming audacity while she laid her commands upon him for the afternoon's motoring or the evening's bridge party or what other social diversion she might have in view.
But now there was a difference. Brouillard felt it instinctively—and in the momentary silence saw it in a certain hard brilliance of the beautiful eyes, in the curving of the ripe lips, half scornful, half pathetic, though the pathos may have been only a touch of self-pity born of the knowledge that the world of the luxury-lapped has so little to offer once the cold finger of satiety has been laid upon the throbbing pulse of fruition.
"You have been quarrelling with father again," she said, with an abruptness that was altogether foreign to her habitual attitude toward him. "I have come to try to make peace. Won't you ask me to sit down?"
He recalled himself with a start from his abstracted study of the faultless contour of cheek and chin and rounded throat and placed a chair for her, apologizing for the momentary aberration and slipping easily from apology into explanation.
"It was good of you to try to bring the wine and oil," he said. "But it was scarcely a quarrel; the king doesn't quarrel with his subjects."
"Now you are making impossible all the things I came to say," she protested, with a note of earnestness in her voice that he had rarely heard. "Tell me what it was about."