"I admire tobacco in its naked beauty," he observed with the wraith of a smile, and himself struck a match for me. Again I admired the whiteness of his hand, its pointed fingers and strong sensitivity of outline. Such hands generally betoken nervousness, but Varduk was serene. Even the fall of his fringed lids over those plumbless eyes seemed a deliberate motion, not an unthought wink.
Yet again a knock at the door, a brief colloquy and an ushering in by Elmo Davidson. This time it was Sigrid.
I got to my feet, as unsteady as a half-grown boy at his first school dance. Desperately I prayed not to look so moved as I felt. As for Sigrid, she paused and met my gaze frankly, with perhaps a shade's lightening of her gently tanned cheeks. She was a trifle thinner than when I had last seen her five years ago, and wore, as usual, a belted brown coat like an army officer's. Her hair, the blondest unbleached hair I have ever known, fell to her shoulders and curled at its ends like a full-bottomed wig in the portrait of some old cavalier. There was a green flash in it, as in a field of ripened grain. Framed in its two glistening cascades, her face was as I had known it, tapering from brow to chin over valiant cheekbones and set with eyes as large as Varduk's and bluer than Davidson's. She wore no make-up save a touch of rouge upon her short mouth—cleft above and full below, like a red heart. Even with low-heeled shoes, she was only two inches shorter than I.
"Am I late?" she asked Varduk, in that deep, shy voice of hers.
"Not a bit," he assured her. Then he saw my awkward expectation and added, with monumental tact for which I blessed him fervently, "I think you know Mr. Gilbert Connatt."
Again she turned to me. "Of course," she replied. "Of course I know him. How do you do, Gib?"
I took the hand she extended and, greatly daring, bent to kiss it. Her fingers fluttered against mine, but did not draw away. I drew her forward and seated her in my chair, then found a backless settee beside her. She smiled at me once, sidewise, and took from my package the cigarette I had forsaken for Varduk's cigar.
A hearty clap on my shoulder and a cry of greeting told me for the first time that little Jake Switz had entered with her.
Varduk's brief but penetrating glance subdued the exuberant Jake. We turned toward the desk and waited.