e powder. She was
startlingly slight. Blake, as he watched her, could see the oval
shadows under her collar bones and the almost girlish meagerness of
breast half-covered by the azure silk bodice.

She looked up slowly as Blake stepped into the room. Her eyes widened,
and she continued to look, with parted lips, as she contemplated the
intruder's heavy figure. There was no touch of fear on her face. It
was more curiosity, the wilful, wide-eyed curiosity of the child. She
even laughed a little as she stared at the intruder. Her rouged lips
were tinted a carmine so bright that they looked like a wound across
her white face. That gash of color became almost clown-like as it
crescented upward with its wayward mirth. Her eyebrows were heavily
penciled and the lids of the eyes elongated by a widening point of blue
paint. Her bare heel, which she caressed from time to time with
fingers whereon the nails were stained pink with henna, was small and
clean cut, as clean cut, Blake noticed, as the heel of a razor, while
the white calf above it was as thin and flat as a boy's.

"Hello, New York," she said with her foolish and inconsequential little
laugh. Her voice took on an oddly exotic intonation, as she spoke.
Her teeth were small and white; they reminded Blake of rice, while she
repeated the "New York," bubblingly, as though she were a child with a
newly learned word.

"Hello!" responded the detective, wondering how or where to begin. She
made him think of a painted marionette, so maintained were her poses,
so unreal was her make up.

"You 're the party who 's on the man hunt," she announced.

"Am I?" equivocated Blake. She had risen to her feet by this time,
with monkey-like agility, and showed herself to be much taller than he
had imagined. He noticed a knife scar on her forearm.

"You 're after this man called Binhart," she declared.

"Oh, no, I 'm not," was Blake's sagacious response. "I don't want
Binhart!"

"Then what do you want?"

"I want the money he 's got."

The little painted face grew serious; then it became veiled.

"How much money has he?"

"That's what I want to find out!"

She squatted ruminatively down on the edge of her divan. It was low
and wide and covered with orange-colored silk.

"Then you'll have to find Binhart!" was her next announcement.

"Maybe!" acknowledged Blake.

"I can show you where he is!"

"All right," was the unperturbed response. The blue-painted eyes