The front door was being opened. Billy Kane stood up, shrugging his shoulders. He was in a truculent mood now, impatient to be gone, prompted even now to go, restrained only by the cooler counsel of common sense. She had the whip-hand over him. A word from her, and he would be in exactly the same case as if he had failed in the play he had just made with the Cadger and Gannet. Voices reached him; hers, quiet and controlled; a man’s, gruff, irritated, sharply antagonistic.
And then the door from the hall opened, and the lights in the library went on. Billy Kane’s eyes, passing swiftly over the trim little figure in black across the room, met and held those of a man who, startled now, stepped hastily back, only to discover that his companion had quietly and swiftly closed the door behind them.
The man’s lips were suddenly compressed and hard, though the color had ebbed a little from his face.
“Please sit down over there at the table, Mr. Dayler,” she requested softly.
“No!” exclaimed the man angrily. “I’ll do nothing of the kind! What’s the meaning of this? You inveigled me back here by hinting at some kind of story, and you run me, in my own house, into the presence of a thug!”
“It is true that I asked this—gentleman”—she hesitated over the choice of the word, while her eyes in a sort of mocking humor inventoried Billy Kane’s none too reputable appearance and attire—“to come here; but it is equally true that I have ‘some kind of a story’ that I think will interest you. Bundy, you might try and _persuade_ Mr. Dayler to sit down!”
A grim smile came to Billy Kane’s lips. He was a pawn too, like this Dayler; a pawn to be moved about at will by this outrageously courageous, imperturbable, and, yes, in spite of his own irritation, adorable little personage. He turned his attention now to Dayler. The other could have been no more than forty-five, yet his hair was not merely prematurely gray, it was white, as a very old man’s is white; his face, clean shaven, was kindly, though drawn now in tense lines about the lips and forehead.
“Sit down!” Billy Kane ordered curtly. He was fingering his automatic, playing up to the cue she had given him.
Dayler hesitated; and then abruptly stepped forward and flung himself into a chair at the table, his back to the mantel.