"Dick Brooke? Dick Brooke's daughter? Why, then ... the daughter also of a dancing-girl!"
Her face went white with anger.
"Oh ... I hate you! Oh, I hate you! You ... you are contemptible!"
"Aha! So that hurts!" he jeered at her.
"It is a cruel lie. Olymphe Labelle was not a dancing-girl.... She was an artist! And a woman among ten thousand...."
The firelight cast its warm glow over her face. She lifted her chin defiantly. Her hair fell in loose, rippling strands of bronze and over her shoulders. She was very beautiful thus; no woman on whom Bruce Standing had ever looked was half so beautiful. And haughty, like a princess ... like a high-bred lady made captive, yet scorning to show sign of fear....
"You are Lynette Brooke," he muttered; "you are the girl who laughed at me, shaming me; you are the girl who shot me in the back! Those are the things to remember. A treacherous cat of a woman; a gun woman! One to go sneaking around with a revolver at hand to shoot a man in the back with...."
"Any woman, dealing with men like you, has need of a gun!"
"I'll tell you this," he muttered. "I'm a fair judge of men, if not of women. And when it's a case of a man ... why just show me a man who carries a pocket-gun and I'll show you a cheap ragamuffin, a tin horn, or an overgrown kid ... or a dirty coward. A man's weapon is a rifle carried in the open; give me a good pair of boots and I'll stamp the white livers out of a whole crowd of your little gunmen.... As for women, gun-toting women...." He broke off with a heavy shrug. "Now, girl, I'm hungry. The smell of your coffee has been in my nostrils a long time. See what you can give me to eat."
"So I am to wait on you ... to be your servant...."