“As you wish.”
“Say in the course of a week or two?”
“If you desire.”
She rose, as if to conclude the interview, and took the check and voucher from the table and handed them to him.
“Can’t I prevail on you,” he said, “to accept this gift?”
“Not to-day, Mr. Malleson.”
“When I come again?”
“Possibly. It is said that a woman is never twice of the same mind.”
“Then I shall certainly come.”
He was looking at her still with undisguised and ever-increasing admiration. Not that he was conscious of it. It was purely involuntary. He would not knowingly have sought, in this way, to impress or embarrass a woman whose husband’s dead body was lying just back of the first closed door. For he was a gentleman, and had a gentleman’s sense of the proprieties. But he was utterly powerless to hide the impression that the woman’s beauty was making on him. Moreover it was a versatile beauty. In the brief space occupied by his visit he had seen its character diametrically change. From the strong, scornful, splendid type maintained during the greater part of his interview with her, it had been transformed into the tender, clinging, trusting variety that with many men is still more alluring. But, whatever its character, it held him irresistibly under its spell. He moved backward to the outer door, his gaze still fastened on the woman’s face. She gave him her hand at parting. It was a warm, confident, lingering hand-clasp, attuned to the look in her eyes, to the modulation of her voice, to the general friendliness of her manner. It was not the art of coquetry. It was as much deeper and more subtle than that as the sea is deeper and more subtle than the shallow pool. A woman does not play the coquette while a sheet-covered thing that had been her husband lies ghastly still and gruesome in an adjoining room.