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held out her arms to him. Her lips were dry and hot and hard. Ten years had done some shocking things to her. She had been a leggy youngster with a rich, dark beauty that burned beneath the surface and glowed in her eyes. She had been vital and alive, tingling with youth and a fervid passion for life and love.
    Now her long-limbed body was thin and taut, her face almost haggard. Two spots of rouge far back on her cheeks gave her a feverish look, and her eyes glittered with the same unnatural brightness. She was the embodiment of a woman who for a long time had made a habit of drinking too much, and sleeping and eating too little.
    Shayne stepped back from her embrace, and she slid her hands down his arms to grip his fingers tightly. She asked, “Do you always come into your room with a bound like that?”
    “How did you get in?”
    “Oh, I bribed the bellboy. He asked me if I was Mrs. Shayne, and I told him I wasn’t, and he seemed to think that made everything all right.”
    Shayne released his hands from hers and went back to close the door. He said morosely, “You spilled some of my cognac. It’s hard to get nowadays.”
    “I’m sorry. I didn’t spill much, Michael.” She sank back into her chair, and got a cigarette from her bag. She put it between her red lips and looked to him for a light. When Shayne struck a match to it, she inhaled deeply and let the smoke filter through her nostrils. Tilting her head back to look into his eyes, she said, “It’s been a long time,” and for a moment forgot to be glib and flippant.
    He nodded and extinguished the match. He moved back to sit on the edge of the bed and asked, “How did you know I was here?”
    “I read the Free Press. And I know you were out to see Father this morning.”
    “At this hotel — I mean.”
    “You stayed here ten years ago. I took a chance and asked at the desk.” Carmela made an impatient gesture with the long, thin fingers of her right hand. “Have you seen Lance?”
    “Not for ten years.” Shayne reached for the bottle of cognac by the bedside table and poured a drink. He didn’t offer Carmela one. She didn’t appear to notice. Her great dark eyes were fixed on his face. She said, “He’s here.”
    “In El Paso?”
    She nodded. “I saw him three days ago in a taxi downtown. He didn’t see me. He was riding with a Mexican girl. A common little Mexican wench whom he must have picked up in Juarez on the Calle de Diablo. He looked terrible,” she ended in a lifeless tone.
    Shayne took a drink of cognac and murmured, “I’ve wondered what became of him.” After a moment’shesitation he asked, “Did you ever see him after you came back from your trip abroad?”
    “No. He’d left town. He never wrote to me, Michael,” she answered softly, as though for an instant she lived in a dream.
    “Why would he?” Shayne asked angrily. “Lance wasn’t the kind to come crawling back after you kicked him in the teeth.”
    “I know.” Her upper lip trembled, and a semblance of the fire Shayne had seen years ago kindled in her eyes. “I’ve hated myself for letting Father do that to me. But I was so young, Michael. I had been reared to think he was like God. My mother was Spanish, you know. She taught me that it was a woman’s place to submit.”
    Shayne ignored the plea in her voice. He asked impatiently, “Do you know where Lance has been? What he’s been doing?”
    “I heard indirectly that he went to China. And later to Germany. Neil Cochrane called me once to say he had heard a short-wave propaganda broadcast from Berlin by Lance. I didn’t believe it, but Neil later sent me a news clipping giving Lance’s name as one of a group of renegade American journalists aiding Hitler.”
    Shayne scowled over a drink of cognac and was silent. The girl in front of him needed to talk things out. She had kept too much bottled up for too long.
    “And now Lance is back in El Paso,” she went on drearily. “He looks old and bitter and