"You wouldn't be here now," Louisa coldly went on, "if you weren't fortune's bright-eyed boy. You were slated to be taken off the boat at Malta and shot; the boat didn't stop at Malta through no fault of ours, and so you arrived at Alexandria--and became a nuisance." One of the girl's hands lifted from her lap and lazily played along the edge of the rosewood standard which supported the mirror on the dressing table. It stopped at a curiously carved rosette in the rococo scroll-work. Capper's suspicious eye noted the movement. He sparred for time--the time needed by those stealthy feet to shorten the distance between themselves and the girl.
"Why," he hissed, "why did you give me a number with the Wilhelmstrasse and send me to Alexandria if I was to be caught and shot at Malta? That's what I'm here to find out."
"Excellent Capper!" Her fingers were playing with the convolutions of the carved rosette. "Intelligent Capper! He comes to a lady's room at night to find the answer to a simple question. He shall have it. He evidently does not know the method of the Wilhelmstrasse, which is to choose two men for every task to be accomplished. One--the 'target,' we call him--goes first; our friends whose secrets we seek are allowed to become suspicious of him--we even give them a hint to help them in their suspicion. They seize the 'target,' and in time of war he becomes a real target for a firing squad, as you should have been, Capper, at Malta. Then when our friends believe they have nipped our move in the bud follows the second man--who turns the trick."
Capper was still wrestling with that baffling stubbornness of the body. Each word the girl uttered was like vitriol on his writhing soul. His mind willed murder--willed it with all the strength of hate; but still the springs of his body were cramped--by what? Not cowardice, for he was beyond reckoning results. Certainly not compassion or any saving virtue of chivalry. Why did his eyes constantly stray to that white hand lifted to allow the fingers to play with the filigree of wood on the mirror support?
"Then you engineered the stealing of my number--from the hollow under the handle of my cane--some time between Paris and Alexandria?" he challenged in a whisper, his face thrust forward between hunched shoulders.