“I know all that,” was the impatient reply. She hurried on. “I know monsieur le général’s history since he was a légionnaire. But it is of your present plans I wish to speak, not of your past. Is it not true that you intend to return to America?”
“I’d thought of it,” he admitted, “but, since they 59 have adopted prohibition——” He shrugged his shoulders and looked with raised eyebrows at the stack of saucers bearing damning witness to his habits.
She stopped him with an equally expressive gesture, implying distaste for him and his habits or any discussion of them.
“But Monsieur Doolittle has also told me that monsieur is reckless, that he has the temperament of the gamester, that he is bored; in a word, that he would, as the Americans say, ‘take a chance.’ Is he wrong in that, also?”
“No,” said De Launay, “but there is a choice among the chances which might be presented to me. I have no interest in the hazards incidental to——”
Then, for the life of him, he could not finish the sentence. He halfway believed the woman to be merely a demimondaine who had heard that he might be a profitable customer for venal love, but, facing that blank mask above the red lips and firm chin, sensing the frozen anger that lay behind it, he felt his convictions melting in something like panic and shame.
“Monsieur was about to say?” The voice was soft, dangerously soft.
“Whatever it was, I shall not say it,” he muttered. “I beg mademoiselle’s pardon.” He was relieved to see the lips curve in laughter and he recovered his 60 own self-possession at once, though he had definitely dismissed his suspicion.
“I am, then a gambler,” he prompted her. “I will take risks and I am bored. Well, what is the answer?”
Mademoiselle’s hands were on the table and she now was twisting the slender fingers together in apparent embarrassment.