A Soul of Steel Read Online Free PDF Page B

do ourselves.” Godfrey took up his cane and leaned toward Irene, who had been lost in feeding the inordinately tame wren. “We should take our leave,” he suggested quietly.
    She started, then began to don her dashing, though unconventional black gloves, suitable only for mourning.
    “Was I ignoring you? Dreadfully sorry. I was wondering if Casanova might not like this precious little one for a companion— although Lucifer would like it too well, I fear!”
    Lucifer was the black Persian cat Irene had “given” me on my arrival in Paris in August. He was large and lazy and, despite my distaste for cats, often lay across my diary as I wrote or lounged in my lap when I attempted some domestic duty, such as the crochet work that his wicked claws would snarl.
    “I agree,” said I, gathering up my reticule. “That is the trouble with these so-called ‘romantic’ sidewalk cafés of Paris; they provide a fishbowl for the sharks that prowl the streets to prey upon innocents. Godfrey, that scoundrel is not moving on. If anything, he is coming closer. Hurry!”
    “Oh?” Irene came out of her trance and began to look around in the manner she recommends to me: missing nothing but appearing to overlook everything.
    “Do hurry, Irene! Once again you have attracted the attention of some unsavory individual. I will not have our Sunday ruined by an unseemly incident. I knew coming into Paris would be a mistake.”
    Irene instantly singled out the very man whose demeanor so agitated me. “He’s only a poor foreign beggar, Nell.”
    “Some foreign rogue who would see us poorer, no doubt. Please, Irene! For once could you refrain from involving us in a public scene? We need only step along to the Left Bank and our coachman will collect us, and we will have had a thoroughly enjoyable outing with not one thing to mar the day.”
    “Oh, very well.” Irene took Godfrey’s arm with an indulgent smile at me, but she moved so languidly I feared the rude watcher would have time to bolt toward us and do whatever he so clearly had in mind: beg, beseech, or berate us with some insanity.
    Godfrey extended his other arm, which I took, and we threaded through the tables to the street. Most of the passersby were respectable to the point of being fashionable. Top hats bobbled past the blue turban that never left my view, and a tall, blonde woman with golden sable fur burnishing her hem and shoulders brushed past the watching man, oblivious to his unsavory nature. Paris accepts anything. We swung right to escape his view and began crossing the street, forced to pause as a fruit vendor pulled his fragrant cart past us.
    I heard no footsteps behind us, but felt such an imperative sense of haste that I crimped my fingers into Godfrey’s arm.
    “Why, Nell,” said he with a reassuring smile. “You are actually worried.”
    “Indeed. Please, you must whisk Irene away before—”
    A presence loomed at our backs. I glimpsed the red-gold pelt of a sable and inhaled a heady foreign perfume—only the fashionable lady but unaccompanied, how odd... and then another figure hove to behind me—the mysterious foreigner about to bump into us!
    We three turned at once, for different reasons: Irene sensing the unknown and rushing to meet it; Godfrey determined to inspect and confront the object of my alarm; I knowing that Fate in bizarre guise was about to enmesh Irene—and Godfrey and me—in another dangerous puzzle.
    There he stood, the man who had so unnerved me. And an unnerving figure he was, his skin chestnut-brown, his face and form gaunt beneath garments that were a patchwork of European and Oriental castoffs.
    You see! I almost shouted triumphantly in front of all the Sunday strollers. You see! Here it begins again; Irene drawing mystery and skullduggery as a magnet attracts metal.
    The fellow, having reached us, fixed us with disbelieving eyes that were—oddly—a shade lighter than his swarthy foreign face. He swayed upon his feet, his