ime comes."

She pouted.

"And what, by the way," he went on, "have _you_ told _me_?"

"I have told you," she answered with dignity, "my one secret."

"The way you feel about me?"

She nodded and blushed. It was going to be a hard lie to keep telling.

"And you've no other secret? Nothing else that you ought to tell me?"

There was more meaning in his voice than in his words, so that for a
moment Rose was startled. Was it possible that the man suspected her,
and was playing with her as a cat plays with a mouse?

"What else could I possibly have to tell you of any importance?"

"I was joking," said the beggar.

Rose sat at the window of her room looking upward into a night of stars.
She could not sleep. Twice she had heard the legless man pass her door
upon his crutches. Each time he had hesitated, and once, or so she
thought, he had laid his hand upon the door-knob. She wondered how much
of her wakefulness was due to fright; and how much to the excitement of
being well launched upon a case of tremendous importance, for the secret
service knew that Blizzard was engaged upon a colossal plot of some
sort, and just what that was Rose had volunteered, at the risk of her
life, and of her honor, to find out.

XII

The next morning, at the appointed hour, Blizzard climbed the stairs to
Barbara's studio, knocked, and was admitted. That he was welcome, if
only for his head's sake, was at once evident.

"Something told me that _you_ wouldn't fail me," said Barbara.

"You can be quite easy about that," said Blizzard. "I am in the habit of
keeping my word."

He climbed to the model's platform and seated himself as upon the
previous morning, with a kind of business-like directness.

"Ready when you are," he said.

Barbara withdrew the damp cloths from the clay, looked critically from
the bust to the original and back again. "My work," she said, "still
looks right to me. But you don't."

Blizzard smiled.

"Yesterday," she said, "you looked as if you were suffering like," she
laughed, "like the very devil. To-day you look well fed and contented.
Now that won't do. Try to remember what you were thinking about when I
first saw you."

At once, as a fresh slide is placed in a magic-lantern, the legless
man's expression of well-being vanished, and that dark tortured look of
Satan fallen which had so fired Barbara's imagination, once more
possessed his features. Barbara's eyes flashed with satisfaction.

"I