Within the Law [91]
The girl explained the matter explicitly enough.
"What do you mean by this outrage?" she stormed. Her voice was low and rich, with a charming roundness that seemed the very hallmark of gentility. But, now, it was surcharged with an indignant amazement over the indignity put upon her by the representatives of the law. Then, abruptly, the blue eyes were softened in their fires, as by the sudden nearness of tears.
"What do you mean?" the girl repeated. Her slim form was tense with wrath. "I demand my instant release." There was indescribable rebuke in her slow emphasis of the words.
Burke was impressed in spite of himself, in spite of his accustomed cold indifference to the feelings of others as necessity compelled him to make investigation of them. His harsh, blustering voice softened perceptibly, and he spoke in a wheedling tone, such as one might employ in the effort to tranquillize a spoiled child in a fit of temper.
"Wait a minute," he remonstrated. "Wait a minute!" He made a pacifically courteous gesture toward one of the chairs, which stood by an end of the desk. "Sit down," he invited, with an effort toward cajoling.
The scorn of the girl was superb. Her voice came icily, as she answered:
"I shall do nothing of the sort. Sit down, indeed!--here! Why, I have been arrested----" There came a break in the music of her tones throbbing resentment. A little sob crept in, and broke the sequence of words. The dainty face was vivid with shame. "I--" she faltered, "I've been arrested--by a common policeman!"
The Inspector seized on the one flaw left him for defense against her indictment.
"No, no, miss," he argued, earnestly. "Excuse me. It wasn't any common policeman--it was a detective sergeant."
But his effort to placate was quite in vain. The ingenuous little beauty with the child's face and the blue eyes so widely opened fairly panted in her revolt against the ignominy of her position, and was not to be so easily appeased. Her voice came vibrant with disdain. Her level gaze on the Inspector was of a sort to suggest to him anxieties over possible complications here.
"You wait!" she cried violently. "You just wait, I tell you, until my papa hears of this!"
Burke regarded the furious girl doubtfully.
"Who is your papa?" he asked, with a bit of alarm stirring in his breast, for he had no mind to offend any one of importance where there was no need.
"I sha'n't tell you," came the petulant retort from the girl. Her ivory forehead was wrinkled charmingly in a little frown of obstinacy. "Why," she went on, displaying new symptoms of distress over another appalling idea that flashed on her in this moment, "you would probably give my name to the reporters." Once again the rosebud mouth drooped into curves of sorrow, of a great self-pity. "If it ever got into the newspapers, my family would die of shame!"
The pathos of her fear pierced through the hardened crust of the police official. He spoke apologetically.
"Now, the easiest way out for both of us," he suggested, "is for you to tell me just who you are. You see, young lady, you were found in the house of a notorious crook."
The haughtiness of the girl waxed. It seemed as if she grew an inch taller in her scorn of the Inspector's saying.
"How perfectly absurd!" she exclaimed, scathingly. "I was calling on Miss Mary Turner!"
"How did you come to meet her, anyhow?" Burke inquired. He still held his big voice to a softer modulation than that to which it was habituated.
Yet, the disdain of the girl seemed only to increase momently. She showed plainly that she regarded this brass-buttoned official as one unbearably insolent in his demeanor toward her. Nevertheless, she condescended to reply, with an exaggeration of the aristocratic drawl to indicate her displeasure.
"I was introduced to Miss Turner," she explained, "by Mr. Richard Gilder. Perhaps you have heard of his father, the owner of the Emporium."
"Oh, yes, I've heard of his father, and of him, too," Burke admitted, placatingly.
But