ul as hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so
narcotizing, had not a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity.
There was nothing outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always
left her doubly dangerous as a law-breaker.

Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of
lethargic beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally
lifted his head and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes
under the level brows. He could see, as he had seen before, that they
were exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray about the
ever-widening and ever-narrowing pupils which varied with varying
thought, as though set too close to the brain that controlled them. So
dominating was this pupil that sometimes the whole eye looked violet,
and sometimes green, according to the light.

Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lip
curved outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first
glance the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and
wilful, contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into
one of Ishmael-like rebellion.

Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown,
and artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It
seemed to stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of
which to be proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair
was daily plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the
meticulous attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching
abundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an
intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again
in ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers
rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done
thoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as though
it were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn
of beauty.

He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at
the time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of
her association with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a
trained nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and
outwitted him at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To
effect this he had whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up
from the City Hospital and sent him in to her as an injured
elevato