“Oh,” she said. “I thought you were the other policeman.”
She fidgeted a little at his silent regard and clicked the gate open, continuing:
“Well—you look a pretty nice boy!”
But the words, though light and brazen in themselves, rang false, and betrayed the novice. She began to flinch under the steady stare of those calm, watchful, passionless eyes and, returning his look with a slight air of defiance, twisted and untwisted her gloves with a little nervous laugh.
Ellis hesitated. He was no Joseph—this was Churchill’s district, and his look-out, was his first impulsive reflection. But something—something that was, perhaps, childish, in the girl’s great dark eyes and winsome face, in which there still remained a trace of her lost innocence and her self-conscious voice and manner, held him awhile longer, motionless.
And, as the man continued to stand there with bent head, curiously still, as if carved in stone, just looking—and looking—in deep, thoughtful silence at the wanton young beauty who sought to tempt him, the filmy, transparent outlines of another face, it seemed to him, rose up alongside hers.
The sweetly grave, spiritual face of a girl, long since dead, whose love had once been his—the very incarnation of womanly purity.
“Yes,” he mused, “that was it—that was it begad! it was the eyes ... they were very, very like poor Eileen’s.”
Presently he cleared his throat and began to speak.
“See here; look, Mandy,” he said soberly. “If I was doing my duty properly I should just take you down to the police station, lock you up, an’ put a charge against you that a certain section of the Criminal Code prescribes for your offense. D’you get me?”