The Bonanza King was already in his office. The same obsequious clerk who had shown her in on a former occasion took her card in to the inner sanctum where the great man, even at this early hour, was shut away with the business which occupied his crowded days. In a moment the young man returned smiling and quite as murmurously polite as he had been on her former visit, and Berny was once again ushered into the presence of the enemy.
The old man had read the name on the card with a lowering glance. His command to admit the visitor had been hardly more than an inarticulate growl which the well-trained clerk understood, as those about deaf mutes can read their half-made signs. Cannon was not entirely surprised at her reappearance, and mingled feelings stirred in him as he turned his swivel chair away from the table, and sat hunched in it, his elbows on its arms, his hands clasped over his stomach.
She came in with an effect of dash, confidence, and brilliancy that astonished him. He had expected her almost to sidle in in obvious, guilty fear of him, her resistance broken, humbly coming to sue for the money. Instead, a rustling, scented apparition appeared in the doorway, more gracious, handsome, and smiling than he had ever thought she could be. She stood for a moment, as if waiting for his invitation to enter, the whole effect of her rich costume, her feverishly high coloring, and her debonair and self-confident demeanor, surprising him into silence. A long white feather on her hat made a background for her darkly-flushed face and auburn hair. There were some amethysts round her neck, their purple lights harmonizing richly with the superb flower pinned on her breast. Her eyes looked very black, laughing, and provocative through her spotted veil.
“Well,” she said in a gay voice, “here I am again! Is it a surprise?”
She advanced into the room, and the old man, almost unconsciously, rose from his chair.
“Yes, sort of,” he said dryly.
She stopped by the desk, looked at him sidewise, and said,
“Do we shake hands?”
His glance on her was hard and cold. Berny met it and could not restrain a sinking of the courage that was her most admirable characteristic and that she had screwed far past its ordinary sticking-point that morning. She sank down into the same arm-chair that she had occupied on her former visit and said, with a little languid effect of indifference,
“Oh, well, never mind. We don’t have to waste time being polite. That’s one of the most convenient things about our interviews. We just say what we really think and there’s no need bothering about humbug.”