Chapter I

A hundred eyes turned as the woman entered the dining-room; a hundred lips parted in admiration as she made her way through the winding aisle of tables in the wake of the straight-backed head-waiter. There were many beautiful women in the room, but, among them all, she was wonderful. Under the soft glow of shaded lights the ivory tints of her skin, with the colour of rich warm blood under it, were accentuated by the burnished gold of her hair. Behind the full red lips the pearl of her teeth showed; the great brown eyes looked over the room calmly, with aloofness. There was nothing girlish about the new arrival. Every line, every curve, bespoke perfect maturity.

Then the lips that had been parted in admiration curved in a smile as the eyes saw the man who followed her. He was scarcely five feet tall; a caricature of a man. His small moustache and ragged Vandyke were so colourless that they could not be seen at a distance. And he walked behind the woman with a peculiar lifting of knees at each step that reminded every one who saw of a helpless little coach-dog. To a hundred minds flashed the simile: the beauty and the beast of Madame Villeneuve’s immortal story.

The waiter, conscious of the new attraction that was to make his dining-room picture perfect, stopped at a table in the corner and pulled back a chair with an unconscious flourish.

“Your table, ma-dame!” Then real regret tinged his tone: “It was all we had.”

A startled look leaped to the eyes of the woman; died on the instant. Her tone was merely casual as she asked:

“You got the reservation--how long ago?”

“A scant ten minutes, ma-dame.”

She turned her great eyes on the little man, and in her voice as she spoke was the lilt of badinage. “And you were to telephone an hour ago, Pierre?” she censured. Her hand idly moved the napkin on the table.

But the man did not answer. He had slumped into the chair at the other side of the small table even before she had made a move toward taking her own seat. His teeth chewed his ragged moustache-ends. Under the table his fingers interlocked and twitchingly separated.

The woman’s opera cloak slipped to the back of the chair, revealing the white purity of the skin of her shoulders, and the curves of the throat. She picked up the _carte du jour_ languidly, and a little pout came to her lips, and a tracery of a scowl appeared on her forehead as she studied the items.

“Absinthe, Pierre, and a cup of bouillon?” she smiled.

The man nodded.

“Only the bouillon for me.”

A slight inclination of her head dismissed the waiter, and he hurried away. The woman rested an elbow on the table-edge and leaned forward. The wonderful smile still curved her lips, but the voice was hard as flint as she whispered in sibilant Italian:--

“Stop it, you fool of a coward!”

His tongue touched his lips. “It has found us!” he muttered chokingly, and the language he used was Russian.

“Hasn’t it always found us?” she demanded hissingly, but the expression on her face changed not a bit. “Hasn’t it always been on our heels? But have I not laughed at it for years? Laugh!” The last word came like the lash of a whip through the smiling lips.

The man’s throat twitched, his face contorted, and a tremulous parody of laughter came.

“Hideous!” she snapped. “Pitiful ape of a man! Stop it!”

“We cannot all be creatures of steel and stone!” he muttered, in the curious patois of northern Hungary.

“We can all act! We can play our parts! Be a gay boulevardier of Paris with the false courage of the green poison in the water of your veins!” She spoke vehemently, and her words were the words of the Gascony peasant.

She turned her gracious smile on the waiter as he appeared with the bouillon and the absinthe for the little man.

“We shall order again presently,” she said, in her perfect English, and the serving-man backed away.

Without touching the folded napkin, she took a sip of the bouillon. Her eyes, pin-points of fire under the shade of the long lashes, watched the man take up the glass of dull-green liquor and drain it at a gulp. The fire died from her eyes as they saw the faint flush of colour come to the yellow skin of the man and the steadiness of the hand that put the empty glass on the cloth.

“Ah,” she murmured, in liquid Spanish, her eyes fixed fondly on the face of the little man. “My Pierre is himself again. Sip of your bouillon, my dear.”

The little man obeyed her meekly. “The gaming-table has played the devil with my nerves,” he growled.

“But they are strong once more. See!” Her fingers lifted the folded napkin and laid it on her knee. The man leaned forward to stare at the white tablecloth it had covered. A gasping whistle of indrawn breath came from his lips. On the white linen beside the woman’s bouillon cup were five smudges of gold; prints of the finger and thumb tips of a right hand.

“The sign of the Gilded Glove!” he choked, and the colour went from his face.

“Cease staring, owl of a man!” she commanded in Italian. “Have you not seen the sign before? Do the wrecked nerves of the _rouge et noir_ table need another franc’s worth of green heart? Summon the waiter.”

With a doglike shake of his body the man threw off the fear that gripped him. He touched his empty glass. The woman gave another order, and the waiter hurried away. Then the man’s eyes were drawn again to the five spots of gold.

“The finger prints of warning, the crushed glove of sentence, the clutched glove of death!” He repeated it as though it were a lesson that, once learned, was never to be forgotten.

“But have they not always been at _my_ side?” she asked quietly. “In Paris, in Constantinople, in Budapest, in St. Petersburg, have I not seen them always by my side? Yet I live! Should I fear in New York, when I have escaped in Europe, where the Long Arm sweeps everything?”

The waiter returned with the absinthe. The little man took the glass up slowly, sipped part of the liquor, and set it down. A glance from the eyes of the woman rewarded him.

“Does my Pierre see any one who might wear the Gilded Glove?” she asked.

His small eyes roved around the dining-room, gazing intently at every face. He shook his head. “They are all Americans; men of wood and women of china. Asses all!” The heavy gutturals of the German he now used made even more incongruous the puniness of his body.

She nodded. “Those who so carefully reserved the table that we might see the sign have gone,” she said, “and other ears cannot follow our talking.”

The man caught a glimpse of some one his eyes had missed before; he moved a trifle to the left, to see behind a great pillar in a far corner of the room.

“Your blind friend is eating his midnight meal of bread and beef-gravy,” he said.

“Mr. Colton?” There was a new tone in the voice now, and the man instantly recognised it.

“A blind man?” There was a sneer in the words.

“I fear him!” she whispered. “He is the only man on earth I have ever feared. He is the only man on earth I know I cannot deceive. All the things I have--my beauty, my nerves of steel, my acting, are to him as nothing. They delude only men of keen eyes! The American secret agents who watch us are fools, but he----.”

“Bah! A blind pig of an American!” he sneered again. It was the man whose nerve was perfect now; it was the woman who was unstrung.

“His blindness makes me afraid!” She was talking passionately in French. “Minds that are closed to all the world are an open book to him. I know it!”

“You think he knows of the plans; of our going away to-morrow?” The voice was sarcastic, but the words came slowly, haltingly, droned in the dialect of the lower Yang-tse-Kiang River.

“I know not!” she whispered, in purest Japanese. “He may; he may not. But no mistake have I ever made in a man!”

“Then hide your fear,” warned the man. “He has emptied his last glass of Célestin, and is coming toward this table.”

The woman’s hand fluttered tremulously toward her throat; but in an instant she was her calm, collected self. As she ate, and talked French commonplaces to the little man, she watched the approach of Thornley Colton from the corner of her eyes. She saw the white hair that curled and waved from the pink scalp; the wonderful paleness of the face that was brought out strikingly by the great round lenses of the smoked-glass library spectacles with their tortoise-shell rims. She knew that the eyes behind them had been sightless from birth; yet the strides of the approaching man through the winding aisle of tables were long and confident. Not a false move did he make, stepping aside at just the proper moment to avoid hurrying waiters, halting a second to let a nimble omnibus pass; never once turning to ask a question of the black-haired, apple-cheeked man who followed at his heels.

At the table he stopped, a smile of pleasure lighting his pale, strong face, as he extended his hand. “A delightful surprise, Madame Gorski!” he said, with quiet enthusiasm. “Sydney told me that you were here, but I could scarcely credit my good fortune. When is the next of your marvellous recitals to be?”

The woman’s smile of joy and surprise as she took his hand had been wonderful in its perfection, and as she answered his last question, no human ear could have detected the lie behind the words: “In a few days, M’seur Colton. You are an inspiration. One seldom finds so appreciative a person. My husband thinks them frightful affairs.”

“But Monsieur Gorski is not blind,” smiled Colton, as he took the hand of the little man. “Music is the only beautiful thing we of the darkness have, you know. Eyes can see God’s wonderful creations and the beautiful things man’s hands have wrought. We can only hear.”

A tender look of genuine sympathy came to the eyes of Madame Gorski. “Won’t you sit down and talk?” she invited.

She saw Thornley Colton’s hand go to his vest-pocket, and she knew that the supersensitive finger-tips were feeling the face of the crystalless watch he carried.

He shook his head. “It is twelve-forty,” he apologised. “I make it my invariable rule to be in bed at one.” He stepped back regretfully. “Pardon me,” he said suddenly, “your napkin has fallen to the floor.” He leaned over quickly, picked it up, and put it on the end of the table. “Au revoir.” He smiled again, and with a nod to the silent Sydney Thames, who had merely bowed to the man and the woman, he started between the tables towards the entrance of the dining-room.

The woman’s eyes followed him. When he had disappeared through the door she turned to her husband. “A wonderful man!” she murmured. “Wonderful!” She expected a sneer, but her husband was staring at the crumpled-up napkin Thornley Colton had picked up.

“You say he is blind!” he hissed, in French.

She nodded, puzzled.

“Then how did he know your napkin had fallen? Can he hear the fall of linen on velvet? Can he?”

She reached toward the napkin, lifted a corner as she pulled it toward her; then withdrew her hand suddenly. In the crumpled-up folds of the linen both had seen the dull glint of gilt; both knew that concealed in the napery was a crushed, gilded glove!

“The sentence!” choked the man.

The woman lifted her eyes to the door through which Thornley Colton had passed a few minutes before. “Can he be one of the sinews of the Long Arm?” she murmured: “A man like that!”

Her fingers toyed with her fork a moment. “Pay the check, Pierre,” she said finally, and there was a note of hopelessness in her voice. “We will go home. I am tired.”

The admiring eyes that had watched the woman enter followed her as she left the room. The face, calm, patrician, was beautiful; and the long lashes hid the look in the deep, brown eyes. In the taxi seat she relaxed; the beautiful face held an expression of utter weariness. The little man’s hand touched her shoulder reverently, caressingly.

“Do not falter now, _ma chère_,” he murmured. “To-morrow we will have the plans of the harbour mines and the hundred thousand dollars they will bring. We will go far away, then, out of reach of the Long Arm and its glove of gilt.”

“To-morrow,” she breathed softly, and she touched his cheek with her lips. She was a woman, was Hedwig Gorski, strange, unreadable. Her heart was a woman’s heart, and grim-lipped men in a hundred cities knew that she loved this little caricature of a man. A smile came to her lips. “Yes,” she whispered, in low-voiced Russian, “to-morrow we will be through with it all.”

At the big hotel where they stopped the woman commanded the same admiration; the man the same derisive smiles. But they did not see. In their apartment on the thirteenth floor, whose door was watched night and day by the floor clerks they had bribed to see that no one entered, the woman sank into a big chair beside the table. The man snapped on the lights in every room, and peered into every corner. “No one has entered,” he announced, when he had seen that every window still held the screws he had driven through the frames the first hour they had occupied the apartments.

“Leave me a few minutes, _mon cher_,” the woman said, and she pulled his head down to kiss him. “I must think--alone.”

Obediently, doglike, he went out into the hall and turned the key in the lock behind him. The woman sighed. She rose and went to the small cabinet, took from it a bottle of wine and a glass. She started to pour the liquor; then shook her head.

“Poison,” she whispered. “That would be their only chance. I can’t risk it.” She went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water, rinsing the glass under the stream until the water was almost boiling. Then she filled the glass to the brim under the cold-water tap, drained it. She walked slowly back to the room, switched off the lights, and seated herself again in the big chair.

The minutes passed. The woman never moved; her eyes stared unwaveringly into the darkness before her. And from out the dark a gilded hand came slowly, certainly. It touched the throat of the woman. Hedwig Gorski did not move. The fingers of gold tightened.

Outside the door came the voice of Gorski: “Do you wish anything, Hedwig, _ma chère_?”

And from the darkness came the voice of his wife: “_Non_, Pierre, _mon cher_.”

But neither the eyes nor the lips of the woman, nor yet the gilded fingers, had moved.

Silence. The man’s voice called again. There was no answer. Shaking, he unlocked the door and entered the room. A curtain that had been pulled to the bottom of the window was up now. A shaft of moonlight shone on the woman’s face--a dead face. At her throat a golden hand seemed clutched. But he came nearer, and saw that it was an empty, gilded glove. And in the air of the room was the faint odour of crushed bananas.