“Oh, forgive me; I had no business to ask you!” she hurriedly added.
He laughed, and patted her arm. “Why on earth shouldn’t you?”
“I spoke without thinking,” she faltered. “I suppose—that is, it occurs to me—perhaps gentlemen don’t like to be questioned—what I mean is, you didn’t answer, and I was afraid——”
“Afraid nothing!” he reassured her. “You mustn’t dream of being stand-offish with me. I shall get vexed with you if you do. My dear little lady, there isn’t anything in the world that you’re not as free as air to say to me, or ask me. I only hesitated because”—he began, smiling in a rueful, whimsical way down at her—“because it’s too complicated and sinister a recital to rush lightly into. My name is David Mosscrop, and I am an habitual criminal by profession. That will do to start with.”
Vestalia looked earnestly into his face for some sign that he was jesting. It was a clean-shaven face, cast by nature in a mould of gravity. The eyes had seemed a pleasant grey to her first cursory examination; but now, on closer scrutiny, there might be a hardness as of steel in their colour. The lips and chin, too, had a sharpness of line that could mean unamiable things. And yet, how could she credit his words? It was true, she recalled, that by all accounts many superior gamblers, burglars, and other evil characters were in private life most kindly persons—of notoriously generous impulses. Pictures of the outlaws of romance, from Robin Hood to Dick Ryder, crowded upon her mental vision. The countenance into which she tremulously stared might have belonged to any of them—a little blurred by the effects of recent drink, a trifle stained in its lower parts by the need of a razor, yet adventurous, subtle, courageous; above all, commanding. Her heart fluttered at the thought of her own temerity in leaning on his arm, and she shot a swift glance forward toward the big thoroughfare they were nearing, where there would be crowds of people to see her. Then she tightened her hold, and said to herself that she didn’t mind a bit.
“You said I might ask anything I liked,” she found herself saying. “What is your special line of crime?”
“Well, specifically, I don’t know just how they would define me. I am not quite a confidence-man, because nobody ever reposes an atom of confidence in me. Mine is a peculiar sort of case. I cannot be said to deceive any one by my game, and yet, undoubtedly, I come under the general head of impostors. I make my living by obtaining money under false pretences.”
The girl was frankly mystified. This sounded so poor and mean that her instincts fluttered back to the original notion that he was joking. Sure enough, she could see the laughter latent in his eyes, now that she looked again.
“You’re just fooling!” she protested, and tugged admonishingly upon his arm. “Tell me what it is you do, quick!”
“How do you know I do anything?” he demanded. He hugged her arm against his side, to show what great fun it all was.