You yourself said: ‘tomorrow morning’.”

            “Yes; but I didn’t know then—”

            “You didn’t know—?”

            I was still holding her, and my eyes were fixed on hers. She gave me back my look, deeply and desperately. Then she freed herself.

            “Let me go. I’m Kate Spain,” she said.

            We stood facing each other without speaking. Then I gave a laugh, and answered, in a voice that sounded to me as though I were shouting: “Well, I want to marry you, Kate Spain.”

            She shrank back, her hands clasped across her breast. “You knew already? That man told you?”

            “Who—Jimmy Shreve? What does it matter if he did? Was that the reason you ran away from me?” She nodded.

            “And you thought I wouldn’t find you?”

            “I thought you wouldn’t try.”

            “You thought that, having told you one day that I loved you, I’d let you go out of my life the next?”

            She gave me another long look. “You—you’re generous. I’m grateful. But you can’t marry Kate Spain,” she said, with a little smile like the grimace on a dying face.

            I had no doubt in my own mind that I could; the first sight of her had carried that conviction home, and I answered: “Can’t I, though? That’s what we’ll see.”

            “You don’t know what my life is. How would you like, wherever you went, to have some one suddenly whisper behind you: ‘Look. That’s Kate Spain’?”

            I looked at her, and for a moment found no answer. My first impulse of passionate pity had swept me past the shock of her confession; as long as she was herself, I seemed to feel, it mattered nothing to me that she was also Kate Spain. But her last words called up a sudden vision of the life she must have led since her acquittal; the life I was asking to share with her. I recalled my helpless wrath when Shreve had told me who she was; and now I seemed to hear the ugly whisper—”Kate Spain, Kate Spain”—following us from place to place, from house to house; following my wife and me.

            She took my hesitation for an answer. “You hadn’t thought of that, had you? But I think of nothing else, day and night. For three years now I’ve been running away from the sound of my name. I tried California first; it was at the other end of the country, and some of my mother’s relations lived there. They were kind to me, everybody was kind; but wherever I went I heard my name: Kate Spain—Kate Spain! I couldn’t go to church, or to the theatre, or into a shop to buy a spool of thread, without hearing it. What was the use of calling myself Mrs. Ingram, when, wherever I went, I heard Kate Spain? The very school-children knew who I was, and rushed out to see me when I passed, I used to get letters from people who collected autographs, and wanted my signature: ‘Kate Spain, you know.’ And when I tried shutting myself up, people said: ‘What’s she afraid of? Has she got something to hide, after all?’ and I saw that it made my cousins uncomfortable, and shy with me, because I couldn’t lead a normal life like theirs… After a year I couldn’t stand it, and so we came away, and went round the world… But wherever we go it begins again: and I know now I can never get away from it.” She broke down, and hid her face for a moment. Then she looked up at me and said: “And so you must go away, you see.”

            I continued to look at her without speaking: I wanted the full strength of my will to go out to her in my answer. “I see, on the contrary, that I must stay.”

            She gave me a startled glance. “No—no.”

            “Yes, yes. Because all you say is a nervous dream; natural enough, after what you’ve been through, but quite unrelated to reality. You say you’ve thought of nothing else, day and night; but why think of it at all—in that way? Your real name is Kate Spain. Well—what of it? Why try to disguise it? You’ve never done anything to disgrace it. You’ve suffered through it, but never been abased. If you want to get rid of it there’s a much simpler way; and that is to take mine instead. But meanwhile, if people ask you if you’re Kate Spain, try saying yes, you are, instead of running away from them.”

            She listened with bent head and interlocked hands, and I saw a softness creep about her lips. But after I had ceased she looked up at me sadly. “You’ve never been tried for your life,” she said.

            The words struck to the roots of my optimism.