Part 30 (1/2)

He strode out to the powerful motor-car that was always in waiting for him.

CHAPTER XXI

A BIT FROM THE MOVIES

Without any regard to melodrama, when Henriette looked out of the window after von Eichborn had rung the bell and saw him on the steps she was frightened. The look in his eyes as he left her had been burning in her recollection--the kind of look a woman never forgets.

His smile as he bowed to her now was characteristic of his good opinion of himself.

”Having an idle moment I came to call,” he said.

”Oh, thank you!” she answered wildly.

He waited for her to come to the door, but she stood still, pressing her fingers to her temples in blank quandary. Possibly a sense of self-accusation heightened her distraction. She had been polite to him; she had rather opened the way to this visit. How was she to escape? She looked around at her wits' end and saw that Helen was in the room.

”I can't see him, I can't!” she exclaimed. ”You must get me out of it!

I never want to speak to him again!”

She turned to the door opening onto the stairway and ran through it, leaving Helen looking after her in doubt as to what it all meant.

Von Eichborn, having formed the habit in a month of war of walking into chateaux without formality, waiting no longer for Henriette to come into the hall, entered the sitting-room. Helen's back was turned to him and he easily mistook her figure for Henriette's.

”I accepted the invitation from the window, which I found very charming,” he said, ”though from your present att.i.tude I might be led to think that I am not welcome.”

Rather slowly Helen turned, possibly in a certain cynical antic.i.p.ation of his visible surprise when he saw her face instead of the one which had led him, an aide, to absent himself from the General's side. Even that martial self-possession of a darling of Berlin drawing-rooms was temporarily thrown off its balance.

”Oh!” gasped von Eichborn.

”Yes,” said Helen, thoughtfully looking him over with a lift of her chin, ”I'm Henriette's sister.” Inwardly she was ”fighting mad,” but her eyes were coldly staring.

”Your voices are alike, but you do not look alike,” von Eichborn managed to say. He screwed his eyegla.s.s into his eye.

”Really! You have quick perceptions!” she remarked.

Von Eichborn dropped his eyegla.s.s and flicked his gloves, which he was carrying in his hand, against the table.

”And the sister? I came to see her.”

”She does not want to see you, and I'm sure I don't. You would be a dreadful bore.” All quite judiciously as she looked him over; the Helen of impulses, when she ought to have been diplomatic for Phil's sake, according to melodramatic ethics.

”Bore!” That darling of Berlin salons a bore! ”Look here, you shrewish, homely little brute, I've nothing to do with you!” he blurted. ”Tell your sister I'm here--if she is your sister. I think you're only a servant.”

Still Helen was looking him over with cool, superior eyes.

”Very bad-mannered, too!” she remarked.

”But perceptions correct. Shrewish and homely, yes!”

n.o.body on earth had ever spoken to him in this fas.h.i.+on before. He did not think such disrespect was possible. He was red-faced and stuttering as he took a step toward her, raising his gloves as if he would strike her as he often had struck his soldier servant; but his hand dropped in face of her unflinching stare.