“No, mademoiselle, but—”
“Do the military police?”
“No—that is, the foreign division did, when it existed.”
“You are sitting, monsieur,” she said, placidly, “with your left foot so far under the table that it quite inadvertently presses my shoe-tip.”
Speed withdrew his leg with a jerk, asking pardon.
“It is a habit perfectly pardonable in a man who is careful that his spur shall not scratch or tear a patent-leather sabre-tache,” she said.
I had absolutely nothing to say; we both laughed feebly, I believe.
I saw temptation struggling with Speed’s caution; 320 I, too, was almost willing to drop a hint that might change her amusement to speculation, if not to alarm.
So this was the woman for whose caprice Kelly Eyre had wrecked his prospects! Clever—oh, certainly clever. But she had made the inevitable slip that such clever people always make sooner or later. And in a bantering message to her victim she had completed the chain against herself—a chain of which I might have been left in absolute ignorance. Impulse probably did it—reasonless and perhaps malicious caprice—the instinct of a pretty woman to stir up memory in a discarded and long-forgotten victim—just to note the effect—just to see if there still remains one nerve, one pulse-beat to respond.
“Will the pensive gentleman with nine lives have a little more nourishment to sustain him?” she asked.