The Cafe Voisin had many visitors, and Shorland saw at a glance who they
were--liberes, or ticket-of-leave men, a drunken soldier or two, and a
few of that class who with an army are called camp-followers, in an
English town roughs, in a French convict settlement recidivistes. He
felt at once that he had entered upon a trying experience; but he also
felt that the luck would be with him, as it had been with him so many
times these late years. He sat down at a small table, and called to a
haggard waitress near to bring him a cup of coffee. He then saw that
there was another woman in the room. Leaning with her elbows on the bar
and her chin in her hands, she fixed her eyes on him as he opened and
made a pretence of reading La Nouvelle Caledonie. Looking up, he met her
eyes again; there was hatred in them if ever he saw it, or what might be
called constitutional diablerie. He felt that this woman, whoever she
was, had power of a curious kind; too much power for her to be altogether
vile, too physically healthy to be of that class to which the girl who
handed him his coffee belonged. There was not a sign of gaudiness about
her; not a ring, a necklace, or a bracelet. Her dress was of cotton,
faintly pink and perfectly clean; her hair was brown, and waving away
loosely from her forehead. But her eyes--was there a touch of insanity
there? Perhaps because they were rather deeply set, though large, and
because they seemed to glow in the shadows made by the brows, the strange
intensity was deepened. But Shorland could not get rid of the feeling of
active malevolence in them. The mouth was neither small nor sensuous,
the chin was strong without being coarse, the figure was not suggestive.
The hands--confound the woman's eyes! Why could he not get rid of the
feeling they gave him? She suddenly turned her head, not moving her chin
from her hands, however, or altering her position, and said something to
a man at her elbow--rather the wreck of a man, one who bore tokens of
having been some time a gallant of the town, now only a disreputable