"Good gracious, Miss West! You don't look like yourself at all!"
"Good!"
She said good-night and went rapidly down the draughty passages and
the concrete stairs. Jasper was standing inside the outer door and
applauded her.
"Well done. If it weren't for your pose and walk, my dear, I should
hardly have known you myself."
Joan stood beside him, holding her furs close, breathing fast through
the parted, painted lips.
"Is he here, do you know?"
"Yes. He's been waiting. I told him you might be late. Now, keep your
head. Everything depends upon that. Can you do it?"
"Oh, yes. Is the car there? I won't have to stop?"
"Not an instant. But give him a good looking-over so that he'll be
sure, and don't change the expression of your eyes. Feel, make
yourself feel inside, that he's a stranger. You know what I mean.
Good-night, my dear. Good luck. I'll call you up as soon as you get
home--that is, after I've seen your pursuer safely back to his rooms."
But this last sentence was addressed to himself.
Joan opened the door and stepped out into the chill dampness of the
April night. The white arc of electric light beat down upon her as she
came forward and it fell as glaringly upon the figure of Pierre. He
had pushed forward from the little crowd of nondescripts always
waiting at a stage exit, and stood, bareheaded, just at the door of
her motor drawn up by the curb. She saw him instantly and from the
first their eyes met. It was a horrible moment for Joan. What it was
for him, she could tell by the tense pallor of his keen, bronzed face.
The eyes she had not seen for such an agony of years, the strange,
deep, iris-colored eyes, there they were now searching her. She
stopped her heart in its beating, she stopped her breath, stopped her
brain. She became for those few seconds just one thought--"I have
never seen you. I have never seen you." She passed so close to him
that her fur touched his hand, and she looked into his face with a
cool, half-disdainful glitter of a smile.
"Step aside, please," she said; "I must get in." Her voice was
unnaturally high and quite unnaturally precise.
Pierre said one word, a hopeless word. "Joan." It was a prayer. It
should have been, "Be Joan." Then he stepped back and she stumbled
into shelter.
At the same instant another man--a man in evening dress--hastily
prevented her man from closing the door.