“What were you about to do?” I demanded sharply—but in my heart, poor fool that I was, I found admiration for the exquisite arch of Karamaneh’s lips, and reproach because they were so tremulous.
She spoke then.
“Dr. Petrie—”
“Well?”
“You seem to be—angry with me, not so much because of what I do, as because I do not remember you. Yet—”
“Kindly do not revert to the matter,” I interrupted. “You have chosen, very conveniently, to forget that once we were friends. Please yourself. But answer my question.”
She clasped her hands with a sort of wild abandon.
“Why do you treat me so!” she cried; she had the most fascinating accent imaginable. “Throw me into prison, kill me if you like, for what I have done!” She stamped her foot. “For what I have done! But do not torture me, try to drive me mad with your reproaches—that I forget you! I tell you—again I tell you—that until you came one night, last week, to rescue some one from—” There was the old trick of hesitating before the name of Fu-Manchu—“from him, I had never, never seen you!”
The dark eyes looked into mine, afire with a positive hunger for belief—or so I was sorely tempted to suppose. But the facts were against her.
“Such a declaration is worthless,” I said, as coldly as I could. “You are a traitress; you betray those who are mad enough to trust you—”