me beg you to have a care. You're much too savage, my dear child. Don't
be so foolish as to--well, turn comedy into the other thing. In the
first place, it's not worth while, and, in the second place, it recoils
always. Revenge may be sweet. I don't know. But nowadays, with police
courts and all that, it entails much more subsequent annoyance than it
is worth. Be wise, Olga!"

"Some things, Ste. Marie," said the golden lady, "are worth all the
consequences that may follow them."

She watched Captain Stewart across the room, where he stood chatting
with a little group of people, and her beautiful face was as hard as
marble and her eyes were as dark as a stormy night, and her mouth, for
an instant, was almost like an animal's mouth--cruel and relentless.

Ste. Marie saw, and he began to be a bit alarmed in good earnest. In his
warning he had spoken rather more seriously than he felt the occasion
demanded, but he began at last to wonder if the occasion was not in
reality very serious, indeed. He was sure, of course, that Olga Nilssen
had come here on this evening to annoy Captain Stewart in some fashion.
As he put it to himself, she probably meant to "make a row," and he
would not have been in the least surprised if she had made it in the
beginning, upon her very dramatic entrance. Nothing more calamitous than
that had occurred to him. But when he saw the woman's face turned a
little away and gazing fixedly at Captain Stewart, he began to be aware
that there was tragedy very near him--or all the makings of it.

Mlle. Nilssen turned back to him. Her face was still hard, and her eyes
dark and narrowed with their oddly Oriental look. She bent her shoulders
together for an instant and her hands moved slowly in her lap,