Then he held the lamp closer to her face.

He nursed no illusions about women.

Frances Durkin knew that for years now he had made them his tools and his accomplices, never his dictators and masters.

But as he looked into the pale face, with the shadowy, almost luminous violet eyes, and the soft droop of the full red lips, and the still girlish tenderness of line about the brow and chin, and then at the betraying fulness of throat and bosom, the mockery died out of his smile.
It was supplanted by a look more ominously purposeful, more grimly determined.
"What, madam, did you come here for ?" he demanded.
She shrugged an apparently careless shoulder.
"His Highness, the Prince Ignace Slevenski Pobloff, has always been the recipient of much flattering attention!" She found it still safest to mock him.
"We have had enough of this! What is it?
Money?
Or jewelry ?" She spurned the leather bag on the floor with the toe of her shoe.

He could hear the clink and rattle of the napoleons that followed the movement.