Annister bit his lip. To find her like this! And, all at once, realization came to him with a sudden tightening of the heart.
This girl, waitress or not, crook or not—he had to confess that, in all his wanderings up and down the earth, he had never met her like. A girl in a thousand, he had decided, back there in the dining-room of the Mansion House. What a partner she would make! Now, with a girl like that for a partner...!
On a sudden impulse he leaned forward, his eyes upon the safe door; it swung outward now; somehow she had opened it.
“Pretty smooth,” he commented. “The combination, after all, ha? You worked it. Now, before we have a look, I want to tell you something. I—I’m looking for a partner, Miss—ah—Miss—”
“—Allerton,” she told him, in her eyes a sudden, leaping spark, the brief, baffling, enigmatic look that he had seen back there in the hotel dining-room. But it was gone again even as she spoke:
“All right—partner!” she said, low. “When do we start?”
“Right now!” answered Annister, his gaze upon the girl frankly admiring. He had expected the usual feminine evasions, a play for time, hesitation—anything but this ready acquiescence in his abrupt proposal.
He was not entirely sure of her; his admiration for her beauty, her poise, had nothing to do with the cold judgment whispering now that the whole affair might, after all, be a blind, a trap, devious and crooked as the devious and crooked turnings of Hamilton Rook.
But with Annister to decide was to act.
Bending, he swung wide the safe door, groping forward with exploring hand. His back was toward the girl; consequently he did not see the sudden, revealing gleam in the violet eyes, the quick hardening of the mouth. Swinging forward his pocket flash, the light danced, glimmering, upon a packet of papers, a sheaf of documents. Annister, running over them swiftly, gave a quick exclamation, his hand, in a lightning movement, palming something which he secreted in an inner pocket.