“I have a suspicion that this Monsieur Duchemin was guilty in intention; but when it came to put his intention into execution, he found he had been anticipated.”

“Mademoiselle is too clever for me.  Now I should never have thought of that.”

“He would have been wiser to stay and fight it out.  The very fact of his flight confesses his guilt.”

“Perhaps he did not remember that until too late.”

“And now nothing can clear him.  How sad for him!  A chance meeting with one who is not his friend, a whispered word to the Prefecture, or the nearest agent de police, and within an hour he finds himself in the Sante.”

“Poor chap!” said Lanyard with a doleful shake of the head.

“I, too, pity him,” the woman declared.  “Monsieur:  against my prejudice, your faith in Duchemin has persuaded me.  I am convinced that he is innocent.”

“How good you are!” “It makes me glad I have so well forgotten ever meeting him.  I do not believe I should know him if I found him here, in this very restaurant, even seated by my side.”

“It is mademoiselle now whose heart is great and kind.”

“You may believe it well.”

“And does mademoiselle’s forgetfulness, perhaps, extend even farther into the so dead past?”

“But, monsieur, I was a mere child when I first came to Paris, before the War.  How could anyone reasonably expect my memory of those innocent girlish days to be exact?  Regard that, even then, I met people by hundreds, as a young girl studying for the stage must.  Is it likely one face would stand out in my memory more than another?”

“Quite, if you ask me,” said Lanyard dryly—­“quite likely, if any circumstance connected with that face were at all memorable.”

“But I assure you I was in those days much too self-absorbed to pay much attention to others.  It is that way, you know, in maiden days.”

“Mademoiselle does injustice to her memory,” Lanyard insisted in polite astonishment.  “In some ways it is wonderful.”

The woman looked suddenly aside, so that he could not see her face; but he perceived, with an astonishment which he made no attempt to hide, that she was quaking bodily with some unconfessed emotion.  And when she faced again his unbroken look of grave bewilderment, he discovered that she was really capable of tears.

“Monsieur,” she gasped, “believe it or not, never before have I met one with whom I was so completely en rapport.  And instantaneously!  It is priceless, this!  We must see more of one another.”

“Much more,” Lanyard assented gravely.  “A great deal more,” she supplemented with significance.  “I am sure we shall get along together famously.”

“Mademoiselle offers me great honour—­”

“Nothing less than my friendship.”

“I would be indeed an ingrate to refuse it.  But a question:  Will not people talk?”

“What!” Amusement shook her again.  “How talk?  What more can they say about Liane Delorme?”