The Bronze Hand | Page 2

vehemence.
"Oh!" she cried, with a welcoming gesture; "you are the gentleman from up-stairs who saw a man running away from here a moment ago. Would you know that man if you saw him again?"
"I am afraid not," I replied. "He was only a flying figure in my eyes."
"Oh!" she moaned, bringing her hands together in dismay. But, immediately straightening herself, she met my regard with one as direct as my own. "I need a friend," she said, "and I am surrounded by strangers."
I made a move towards her; I did not feel myself a stranger. But how was I to make her realize the fact?
"If there is anything I can do," I suggested.
Her steady regard became searching.
"I have noticed you before to-night," she declared, with a directness devoid of every vestige of coquetry. "You seem to have qualities that may be trusted. But the man capable of helping me needs the strongest motives that influence humanity: courage, devotion, discretion, and a total forgetfulness of self. Such qualifications cannot be looked for in a stranger."
As if with these words she dismissed me from her thoughts, she turned her back upon me. Then, as if recollecting the courtesy due even to strangers, she cast me an apologetic glance over her shoulder and hurriedly added:
"I am bewildered by my loss. Leave me to the torment of my thoughts. You can do nothing for me."
Had there been the least evidence of falsity in her tone or the slightest striving after effect in her look or bearing, I would have taken her at her word and left her then and there. But the candor of the woman and the reality of her emotion were not to be questioned, and moved by an impulse as irresistible as it was foolhardy, I cried with the impetuosity of my twenty-one years:
"I am ready to risk my life for you. Why, I do not know and do not care to ask. I only know you could have found no other man so willing to do your bidding."
A smile, in which surprise was tempered by a feeling almost tender, crossed her lips and immediately vanished. She shook her head as if in deprecation of the passion my words evinced, and was about to dismiss me, when she suddenly changed her mind and seized upon the aid I had offered, with a fervor that roused my sense of chivalry and deepened what might have been but a passing fancy into an active and all-engrossing passion.
"I can read faces," said she, "and I have read yours. You will do for me what I cannot do for myself, but----Have you a mother living?"
I answered no; that I was very nearly without relatives or ties.
"I am glad," she said, half to herself. Then with a last searching look, "Have you not even a sweetheart?"
I must have reddened painfully, for she drew back with a hesitating and troubled air; but the vigorous protest I hastened to make seemed to reassure her, for the next word she uttered was one of confidence.
"I have lost a ring." She spoke in a low-but hurried tone. "It was snatched from my finger as I reached out my hand to close my shutters. Some one must have been lying in wait; some one who knows my habits and the hour at which I close my window for the night. The loss I have sustained is greater than you can conceive. It means more, much more, than appears. To the man who will bring me back that ring direct from the hand that stole it, I would devote the gratitude of a lifetime. Are you willing to make the endeavor? It is a task I cannot give to the police."
This request, so different from any I had expected, checked my enthusiasm in proportion as it awoke a senseless jealousy.
"Yet it seems directly in their line," I suggested, seeing nothing but humiliation before me if I attempted the recovery of a simple love-token.
"I know that it must seem so to you," she admitted, reading my thoughts and answering them with skilful indirectness. "But what policeman would undertake a difficult and minute search for an article whose intrinsic value would not reach five dollars?"
"Then it is only a memento," I stammered, with very evident feeling.
"Only a memento," she repeated; "but not of love. Worthless as it is in itself, it would buy everything I possess, and almost my soul to-night. I can explain no further. Will you attempt its recovery?"
Restored to myself by her frank admission that it was no lover's keepsake I was urged to recapture and return, I allowed the powerful individuality of this woman to have its full effect upon me. Taking in with one glance her beauty, the impassioned fervor of her nature, and the subtle charm of a