Ingram that she looks like her.”

            Shreve smiled incredulously. “Mrs. Ingram? Is that what you call her?”

            “It’s her name. I was with Mrs. Ingram, of California.”

            “No, you weren’t. You were with Kate Spain. She knows me well enough—ask her. I met her face to face just now, going into the ball-room. She was with a red-headed Jezebel that I don’t know.”

            “Ah, you don’t know the red-headed lady? Well, that shows you’re mistaken. For Miss Cassie Wilpert has lived with Mrs. Ingram as her companion for several years. They’re inseparable.”

            Shreve tossed away his cigarette and stood staring at me. “Cassie Wilpert? Is that what that great dressed-up prizefighter with all the jewelry calls herself? Why, see here, Severance, Cassie was the servant girl’s name, sure enough: Cassie—don’t you remember? It was her evidence that got Kate Spain off. But at the trial she was a thin haggard Irish girl in dirty calico. To be sure, I suppose old Ezra Spain starved his servant as thoroughly as he starved his daughter. You remember Cassie’s description of the daily fare: Sunday, boiled mutton; Monday, cold mutton; Tuesday, mutton hash; Wednesday, mutton stew—and I forget what day the dog got the mutton bone. Why, it was Cassie who knocked the prosecution all to pieces. At first it was doubtful how the case would go; but she testified that she and Kate Spain were out shopping together when the old man was murdered; and the prosecution was never able to shake her evidence.”

            Remember it? Of course I remembered every detail of it, with a precision which startled me, considering I had never, to my knowledge, given the Kate Spain trial a thought since the talk about it had died out with the woman’s acquittal. Now it all came back to me, every scrap of evidence, all the sordid and sinister gossip let loose by the trial: the tale of Ezra Spain, the wealthy miser and tyrant, of whom no one in his native town had a good word to say, who was reported to have let his wife die of neglect because he would not send for a doctor till it was too late, and who had been too mean to supply her with food and medicines, or to provide a trained nurse for her. After his wife’s death his daughter had continued to live with him, brow-beaten and starved in her turn, and apparently lacking the courage to cast herself penniless and inexperienced upon the world. It had been almost with a sense of relief that Cayuga had learned of the old man’s murder by a wandering tramp who had found him alone in the house, and had killed him in his sleep, and got away with what little money there was. Now at last, people said, that poor persecuted daughter with the wistful eyes and the frightened smile would be free, would be rich, would be able to come out of her prison, and marry and enjoy her life, instead of wasting and dying as her mother had died. And then came the incredible rumour that, instead of coming out of prison—the prison of her father’s house—she was to go into another, the kind one entered in hand-cuffs, between two jailers: was to go there accused of her father’s murder.

            “I’ve got it now! Cassie Donovan—that was the servant’s name,” Shreve suddenly exclaimed. “Don’t you remember?”

            “No, I don’t. But this woman’s name, as I’ve told you, isn’t Donovan—it’s Wilpert, Miss Wilpert.”

            “Her new name, you mean? Yes. And Kate Spain’s new name, you say, is Mrs. Ingram. Can’t you see that the first thing they’d do, when they left Cayuga, would be to change their names?”

            “Why should they, when nothing was proved against them? And you say yourself you didn’t recognize Miss Wilpert,” I insisted, struggling to maintain my incredulity.

            “No; I didn’t remember that she might have got fat and dyed her hair. I guess they do themselves like fighting cocks now, to make up for past privations. They say the old man cut up even fatter than people expected. But prosperity hasn’t changed Kate Spain. I knew her at once; I’d have known her anywhere.