"They are making a tool of you," was all she said.
"Of me?"
"Of you! They are deceiving you—they mean to make use of you."
"But how?"
The woman remained silent. McKinnon stood before her, lost in a moment of troubled thought, puzzled as to how much he should say and how much it would be best to leave unsaid.
"But who are you?" he suddenly demanded, noting her quick glance down at her little jewelled watch. He felt, as she stood there compelling herself to calmness, that there was some thing epochal in the moment, that in some way the uncomprehended was about to reveal itself.
He turned slowly about and relocked the cabin door. Then he sat down opposite the broken steamer-chair in which she was already seated.
"You want to know who that man is?" she said at last, perplexed a little by his sudden decisiveness, disturbed by the hardening of his face.
"I want to know who you are."
"That will come later," she explained.
McKinnon studied her face, line by line, from the pale ivory of her dark-browed forehead to the tender curve of her almost statuelike chin, for the shadowy and thick-planted lashes did
