of ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.

The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll
of her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the
desk top.

"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than
a question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of
timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left
the shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense
of power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of
beauty, though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so
wistful 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