Red looked his appreciation of her favor; they were very pretty hands, and while he was not "up" in the flowery etiquette of sunny Spain, he understood its language indifferently well. "Ken's shore thu luckiest devil on yearth!" he muttered under his breath, enviously. It soon developed, however, that his hastily-formed conclusions were at fault. As he in duty bound slowly rose to his feet with a studious, "Well, I must be goin'—see you lateh," she protestingly laid her hand on his arm.
"But no, Señor. It is that I wish to have the speech wis you bot'—but not here." She looked around in sudden alarm. "Can you to my room graciously come? I live in the ho-tel." Her manner was pleading and eager.
The eyes of the men met inquiringly. Red unostentatiously flecked a speck of dust from a slight bulge in his coat under the left armpit. Douglass tentatively placed his hand in the side pocket of his reefer. Then as one man they both answered. "Why, certainly, Señorita."
"In an hour, then. Come carefully. Numero 9, the one mos' far in the hall. I go first, now." And without further look at them she went out as unobtrusively as she had entered. Red calmly confiscated her rejected glass of brandy.
"Shame to waste good likker, 'specially when it's paid fer. What's yuh ijea, Ken, a plant?"
"Damfino! She's all worked up over something, that's sure. Well, it's all in the game." Then, with an inscrutable and not altogether pleasant flicker in his eyes, "Not a bad looker, eh, Red?"
McVey emptied the glass. "Brandy's hell foh a woman," was his enigmatical reply.
An hour later they gained her apartments unobserved, the hotel corridors being deserted at that hour. She had changed her gown and received them in a charming half-negligé of some filmy white stuff that set off her dark beauty ravishingly. Her eyes were out-gleaming her diamonds but her manner was quiet and composed.
They sat down and respectfully awaited her pleasure; but every article in that room could have been accurately catalogued by either man. There was only one door in the room besides the one through which they had entered and that stood partly ajar, revealing beyond a luxuriously furnished bedroom. A large double window gave down on the main street; one-half of it was closely curtained, but the hangings of the other was looped aside, and for a time she stood beside it looking down into the squalid street. Suddenly she drew the curtains close and with a strength hardly to be looked for in that slender wrist, whirled a heavy Morris chair directly before them and seated herself.
For a full minute she regarded them intently through half-closed eyes and then, addressing herself to Douglass, but keeping her eyes for the greater part of the time on McVey, she said slowly in her soft mother tongue: