Joan stood beside him, holding her furs close, breathing fast through the parted, painted lips.
“Is he here, do you know?”
“Yes. He’s been waiting. I told him you might be late. Now, keep your head. Everything depends upon that. Can you do it?”
“Oh, yes. Is the car there? I won’t have to stop?”
“Not an instant. But give him a good looking-over so that he’ll be sure, and don’t change the expression of your eyes. Feel, make yourself feel inside, that he’s a stranger. You know what I mean. Good-night, my dear. Good luck. I’ll call you up as soon as you get home—that is, after I’ve seen your pursuer safely back to his rooms.” But this last sentence was addressed to himself.
Joan opened the door and stepped out into the chill dampness of the April night. The white arc of electric light beat down upon her as she came forward and it fell as glaringly upon the figure of Pierre. He had pushed forward from the little crowd of nondescripts always waiting at a stage exit, and stood, bareheaded, just at the door of her motor drawn up by the curb. She saw him instantly and from the first their eyes met. It was a horrible moment for Joan. What it was for him, she could tell by the tense pallor of his keen, bronzed face. The eyes she had not seen for such an agony of years, the strange, deep, iris-colored eyes, there they were now searching her. She stopped her heart in its beating, she stopped her breath, stopped her brain. She became for those few seconds just one thought—“I have never seen you. I have never seen you.” She passed so close to him that her fur touched his hand, and she looked into his face with a cool, half-disdainful glitter of a smile.
“Step aside, please,” she said; “I must get in.” Her voice was unnaturally high and quite unnaturally precise.
Pierre said one word, a hopeless word. “Joan.” It was a prayer. It should have been, “Be Joan.” Then he stepped back and she stumbled into shelter.
At the same instant another man—a man in evening dress—hastily prevented her man from closing the door.
“Miss West, may I see you home?”