“I could keep that up as a side-line.”
“So you could. But if you use my time for your own profit, you ought to pay me a royalty on your intake.”
His eyes lit with laughter. “I reckon that can be arranged. Any percentage you think fair It will all be in the family, anyway.”
“I think that is one of the things about which we don’t agree,” she made answer softly, flashing him the proper look of inviting disdain from under her silken lashes.
He leaned forward, elbow on the chair-arm and chin in hand. “We’ll agree about it one of these days.”
“Think so?” she returned airily.
“I don’t think. I know.”
Just an eyebeat her gaze met his, with that hint of shy questioning, of puzzled doubt that showed a growing interest. “I wonder,” she murmured, and recovered herself with a hurried little laugh.
How she hated her task, and him! She was a singularly honest woman, but she must play the siren; must allure this scoundrel to forgetfulness, and yet elude the very familiarity her manner invited. She knew her part, the heartless enticing coquette, compounded half of passion and half of selfishness. It was a hateful thing to do, this sacrifice of her personal reticence, of the individual abstraction in which she wrapped herself as a cloak, in order to hint at a possibility of some intimacy of feeling between them. She shrank from it with a repugnance hardly to be overcome, but she held herself with an iron will and consummate art to the role she had undertaken. Two lives hung on her success. She must not forget that. She would not let herself forget that—and one of them that of the man she loved.
So, bravely she played her part, repelling always with a hint of invitation, denying with the promise in her fascinated eyes of ultimate surrender to his ardor. In the zest of the pursuit the minutes slipped away unnoticed. Never had a woman seemed to him more subtly elusive, and never had he felt more sure of himself. Her charm grew on him, stirred his pulses to a faster beat. For it was his favorite sport, and this warm, supple young creature, who was to be the victim of his bow and arrow, showed herself worthy of his mettle.