"Stop where you are, Billy Capper!" The girl's low-spoken order was as cold and tense as drawn wire. No trace of shock or surprise was in her voice. She did not turn her head. Capper was brought up short, as if he felt a noose about his neck.
Slowly the figure seated before the dressing mirror turned to face him. Tumbling hair framed the girl's face, partly veiling the yellow-brown eyes, which seemed two spots of metal coming to incandescence under heat. Her hands, one still holding a comb, lay supinely in her lap.
"I admit this is a surprise, Capper," Louisa said, letting each word fall sharply, but without emphasis. "However, it is like you to be--unconventional. May I ask what you want this time--besides money, of course?"
Capper wet his lips and smiled wryly. He had jumped so swiftly to impulse that he had not prepared himself beforehand against the moment when he should be face to face with the girl from the Wilhelmstrasse. Moreover, he had expected to be closer to her--very close indeed--before the time for words should come.
"I--I saw you to-night and followed you--here," he began lamely.
"Oh, you needn't try to come it over me with words!" Capper's teeth showed in a nasty grin as his rage flared back from the first suppression of surprise. "I've come here to have a settlement for a little affair between you and me."
"Blackmail? Why, Billy Capper, how true to form you run!" The yellow-brown eyes were alight and burning now. "Have you determined the sum you want or are you in the open market?"
Capper grinned again, and shifted his weight, inadvertently advancing one foot a little nearer the seated girl as he did so.
"Pretty quick with the tongue--as always," he sneered. "But this time it doesn't go, Louisa. You pay differently this time--pay for selling me out. Understand!" Again one foot shifted forward a few inches by the accident of some slight body movement on the man's part. Louisa still sat before her dressing mirror, hands carelessly crossed on her lap.
"Selling you out?" she repeated evenly. "Oh! So you finally did discover that you were elected to be the goat? Brilliant Capper! How long before you made up your mind you had a grievance?"
The girl's cool admission goaded the little man's fury to frenzy. His mind craved for action--for the leap and the tightening of fingers around that taunting throat; but somehow his body, strangely detached from the fiat of volition as if it were another's body, lagged to the command. Violence had never been its mission; muscles were slow to accept this new conception of the mind. But the man's feet followed their crafty intelligence; by fractions of inches they moved forward stealthily.