Hook looked in the direction of those footsteps, and his little watery blue eyes grew cunning.
“Elvira!” he called softly.
The portières bulged as if someone had touched them, and the musical feminine voice came through.
“What?”
“Come here.”
“I’d better not. He wouldn’t—”
“Damn him!” Hook flared up. “Come here!”
She came into the room and into the circle of light from the tall lamp; a girl in her early twenties, slender and lithe, and dressed for the street, except that she carried her hat in one hand. A white face beneath a bobbed mass of flame-colored hair. Smoke-grey eyes that were set too far apart for trustworthiness—though not for beauty—laughed at me; and her red mouth laughed at me, exposing the edges of little sharp animal-teeth. She was beautiful; as beautiful as the devil, and twice as dangerous.
She laughed at me—a fat man all trussed up with red plush rope, and with the corner of a green cushion in my mouth—and she turned to the ugly man.
“What do you want?”
He spoke in an undertone, with a furtive glance at the ceiling, above which soft steps still padded back and forth.
“What say we shake him?”
Her smoke-grey eyes lost their merriment and became hard and calculating.