And she knew me.”

            “She didn’t know you,” I broke out; “she said she was mistaken.”

            Shreve pounced on this in a flash. “Ah—so at first she thought she did?” He laughed. “I don’t wonder she said afterward she was mistaken. I don’t dye my hair yet, but I’m afraid I’ve put on nearly as much weight as Cassie Donovan.” He paused again, and then added: “All the same, Severance, she did know me.”

            I looked at the little journalist and laughed back at him.

            “What are you laughing at?”

            “At you. At such a perfect case of professional deformation. Wherever you go you’re bound to spot a criminal; but I should have thought even Mont Soleil could have produced a likelier specimen than my friend Mrs. Ingram.”

            He looked a little startled at my tone. “Oh, see here; if she’s such a friend I’m sorry I said anything.”

            I rose to heights of tolerance. “Nothing you can say can harm her, my dear fellow.”

            “Harm her? Why on earth should it? I don’t want to harm her.”

            “Then don’t go about spreading such ridiculous gossip. I don’t suppose any one cares to be mistaken for a woman who’s been tried for her life; and if I were a relation of Mrs. Ingram’s I’m bound to tell you I should feel obliged to put a stop to your talk.”

            He stared in surprise, and I thought he was going to retort in the same tone; but he was a fair-minded little fellow, and after a moment I could see he’d understood. “All right, Severance; of course I don’t want to do anything that’ll bother her…”

            “Then don’t go on talking as if you still thought she was Kate Spain.”

            He gave a hopeless shrug. “All right. I won’t. Only she is, you know; what’ll you bet on it, old man?”

            “Good night,” I said with a nod, and turned away. It was obviously a fixed idea with him; and what harm could such a crank do to me, much less to a woman like Mrs. Ingram?

            As I left him he called after me: “If she ain’t, who is she? Tell me that, and I’ll believe you.”

            I walked away without answering.

              

 

 IV.
 
 

            I went up to bed laughing inwardly at poor Jimmy Shreve. His craving for the sensational had certainly deformed his critical faculty. How it would amuse Mrs. Ingram to hear that he had identified her with the wretched Kate Spain! Well, she should hear it; we’d laugh over it together the next day. For she had said, in bidding me goodnight: “You’ll tell me the rest in the morning.” And that meant—could only mean—that she was going to listen to me, and if she were going to listen, she must be going to answer as I wished her to…

            Those were my thoughts as I went up to my room. They were scarcely less confident while I was undressing. I had the hope, the promise almost, of what, at the moment, I most wished for—the only thing I wished for, in fact. I was amazed at the intensity with which I wished it. From the first I had tried to explain away my passion by regarding it as the idle man’s tendency to fall into sentimental traps; but I had always known that what I felt was not of that nature. This quiet woman with the wide pale eyes and melancholy mouth had taken possession of me; she seemed always to have inhabited my mind and heart; and as I lay down to sleep I tried to analyze what it was in her that made her seem already a part of me.

            But as soon as my light was out I knew I was going to lie awake all night; and all sorts of unsought problems instantly crowded out my sentimental musings. I had laughed at Shreve’s inept question: “If she ain’t Kate Spain, who is she?” But now an insistent voice within me echoed: Who is she? What, in short, did I know of her? Not one single fact which would have permitted me to disprove his preposterous assertion. Who was she? Was she married, unmarried, divorced, a widow? Had she children, parents, relations distant or near? Where had she lived before going to California, and when had she gone there? I knew neither her birthplace, nor her maiden name, or indeed any fact about her except the all-dominating fact of herself.

            In rehearsing our many talks with the pitiless lucidity of sleeplessness I saw that she had the rare gift of being a perfect listener; the kind whose silence supplies the inaudible questions and answers most qualified to draw one on. And I had been drawn on; ridiculously, fatuously, drawn on. She was in possession of all the chief facts of my modest history. She knew who I was, where I came from, who were my friends, my family, my antecedents; she was fully informed as to my plans, my hopes, my preferences, my tastes and hobbies. I had even confided to her my passion for Brahms and for book-collecting, and my dislike for the wireless, and for one of my brothers-in-law. And in return for these confidences she had given me—what? An understanding smile, and the occasional murmur: “Oh, do you feel that too? I’ve always felt it.”

            Such was the actual extent of my acquaintance with Mrs. Ingram; and I perceived that, though I had laughed at Jimmy Shreve’s inept assertion, I should have been utterly unable to disprove it. I did not know who Mrs.