"Under no conceivable circumstances annoy me with anything that happens at home, unless a matter of immediate life and death, anything else can wait until my return."
He had just finished this important sentence when the sound of a footstep behind his chair caused him to turn suddenly.
Cleo had entered the room and stood glaring at him with a look of sullen defiance.
By a curious coincidence or by design, she was dressed in a scarlet kimono of the same shade of filmy Japanese stuff as the one she wore in his young manhood. His quick eye caught this fact in a flash and his mind took rapid note of the changes the years had wrought. Their burdens had made slight impression on her exhaustless vitality. Whatever might be her personality or her real character, she was alive from the crown of her red head to the tips of her slippered toes.
Her attitude of tense silence sparkled with this vital power more eloquently than when she spoke with quick energy in the deep voice that was her most remarkable possession.
Her figure was heavier by twenty pounds than when she had first entered his home, but she never produced the impression of stoutness. Her form was too sinuous, pliant and nervous to take on flesh. She was no longer the graceful girl of eighteen whose beauty had drugged his senses, but she was beyond all doubt a woman of an extraordinary type, luxuriant, sensuous, dominant. There was not a wrinkle on her smooth creamy skin nor a trace of approaching age about the brilliant greenish eyes that were gazing into his now with such grim determination.
He wheeled from his machine and faced her, his eyes taking in with a quick glance the evident care with which she had arranged her hair and the startling manner in which she was dressed.
He spoke with sharp, incisive emphasis:
"It was a condition of your return that you should never enter my room while I am in this house."
"I have not forgotten," she answered firmly, her eyes holding his steadily.