A flush of anger coloured her cheeks, and her heart began to beat fast. She was conscious of a rôle which fitted her but ill, and was no reflection of herself. How much sooner would she have been downstairs among the well-dressed women who were beginning to flock into the restaurant for lunch! This man's brutal logic threatened to shatter her professed ideals, and to leave her vanity defenceless. She remembered at the same time what the meaning of the triumph would be if she won him. All the country would talk of that!
"You are not offended with me?" he said in a gentler tone. "I'm sure you won't be when you get back home and think of it."
"I shall try to think of it as little as possible."
"As your countrymen are doing. If there was more than half-an-ounce of the radium of common sense in this kingdom at the present moment, some people would be thinking very hard, Miss Silvester——"
"Of what?"
He rose from his chair, thrust his hands deep into his trousers pockets, went over to the window and stood looking out.
"They would be thinking of the frost," he said.
"Perhaps it is too cold to think about it!"
He laughed.
"Well said and true. Did you read in the Times that there is ice in the English Channel for the first time for twenty years?"
"I never read the Times——"
"Then don't begin if you would remain a woman."
"Is she, then, unworthy of it?"
"Not at all—it is unworthy of her. It tells the truth!"
"Oh, I grant that that is embarrassing sometimes. We were speaking of the frost."
"And the fables. The fable, written by a great German, is about to freeze the English Channel and the North Sea! Ice from the Humber to Kiel! Portsmouth frozen up. An ice carnival at the Thames' mouth. Do you believe in fables?"
She stared at him amazed.
"What would happen if this one were true?"
"Oh," he said, "you had better ask the I.A.L."
She was silent a little while, then she said:
"Your bogies are wonderful. Are there many in your life?"
"More than I count."
"They are lucky then?"
"Yes, for one of them sends you to my rooms to-day."
He had never spoken to her in this way before, and the tone of it found her amazed. Hitherto the man of affairs and the woman of the useful vanities had been speaking; but John Faber had changed all that in an instant. She felt his wide eyes focused upon her with a sudden glance which burned. He had taken a step toward her, and for a moment she feared that some mad impulse would drive him to forget the true circumstance of their meeting, and to suppose another. She felt her heart beat rapidly—a true instinct warned her to act upon the defensive.
"I think we were talking of another kind of bogy," she said quickly—"women deserve a new chapter."
He laughed a little hardly, and turned upon his heel.
"The goose awoke and the Capitol is saved. Well, about this frost?"
"Oh, I shall hope for a thaw."
"That's what your I.A.L. is doing all the time. Tell them that John Faber wishes them well, and will sell them a hundred thousand rifles any time they are reconsidering the position. Perhaps I shall meet you when I return from Paris. We can put the contract through then."
She shook her head, trying to hide the annoyance of the rebuff.
"I don't suppose I shall ever see you again," she said.
"I'll bet you a thousand dollars you do, either in Paris or Berlin."
"Why should I go there?"
"Because your little friend Claudine d'Arny will see that you do."
"Oh, that was only an acquaintance on the ship. I had forgotten her."
"My memory is better. I have been chewing her father's name for twenty years."
"Do you know him, then?"
It was his turn to laugh—with the silent anger of a man who remembers.
"He gave the order for my father to be shot. I don't think I'll forget him."
She hardly believed him to be serious. There he stood, smiling softly, one hand deep in his trousers pocket, the other toying with his roses. He had just told her what he would have told no other woman in England, and she thought him a jester.
"Is this one of the fables?"
"Certainly it is. I am going to Paris to write the moral."
She watched his face curiously.
"But, surely, if General d'Arny gave any such order, it was in his official capacity."
"As I shall give mine—in an official capacity."
"Then you have not forgiven him?"
"It is for that very purpose I am going to Paris. That and one other."
"To sell your guns—I read it in the papers."
He smiled—in a kindly way this time.
"I'll give you twenty guesses."
"But I am hopeless at riddles."
"Then I'll solve this one for you. I am going to Paris to give one million dollars to the man who took my mother to America—if I can find him."
"I hope you will succeed—and I wish I knew the man."
He liked this, for it was the first really girlish thing she had said. Perhaps even at that stage Faber read her wholly, and believed that it was good for her to see "common sense in curl papers," as he put it. He might even have led her to talk of her father and her home had not the inexorable secretary knocked upon the door at that very moment. The summons brought him to "attention," as the call of a sergeant to the new recruit.
"Time is unkind to us," he said. "I must go down to Throgmorton Street to make a hundred thousand dollars. Well, we shall meet again in Paris or Berlin. A thousand dollars for your I.A.L. if we don't. Remember me to your father, please. Is he likely to accept that call to Yonkers, by the way?"
"I don't know," she said quite simply; "he is so ignorant about American money."
John Faber smiled at that. Gabrielle went down the Strand blushing furiously, and wondering why she had said anything at once so honest and so foolish.
CHAPTER III
BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH
I
Clad in an alpaca coat, which had long since lost its lining, and in carpet slippers very much too large for him, Gordon Silvester awaited his daughter's return to the house in Well Walk. The luncheon bell had rung a second time, and God alone knew what was in the mind of Agatha, the cook. Silvester feared this woman greatly, especially in those frequently recurring seasons when her madness ran to taking the pledge.
It was a quarter past two when Gabrielle returned, and they should have lunched at half-past one. The minister's anxiety was above all meats, and in his curiosity to know what had happened he forgot the sainted martyr below stairs.
"Well, is he willing, my dear?"
Gabrielle drew a chair to the table; she carried a couple of letters