“O-h!” as though the information conveyed a gentle shock to her.  Her low-breathed exclamation nearly finished Brown.

“I knew you’d think it unpardonable for me—­at such a time—­to venture to—­to—­ask—­say—­express—­convey——­”

“Why do you—­how can I—­where could we—­” She recovered herself resolutely.  “I do not think we ought to take advantage of an accident like this....  Do you?  Besides, probably, in the natural course of social events——­”

“But it may be years! months! weeks!” insisted Brown, losing control of himself.

“I should hope it would at least be a decently reasonable interval of several weeks——­”

“But I don’t know what to do if I never see you again for weeks!  I c-care so much—­for—­you.”

She shrank back in her chair, and in her altered face he read that he had disgraced himself.

“I knew I was going to,” he said in despair.  “I couldn’t keep it—­I couldn’t stop it.  And now that you see what sort of a man I am I’m going to tell you more.”

“You need not,” she said faintly.

“I must.  Listen!  I—­I don’t even know your full name—­all I know is that it is Betty, and that your cat’s name is Clarence and your plumber’s name is Quinn.  But if I didn’t know anything at all concerning you it would have been the same.  I suppose you will think me insane if I tell you that before the car, on which you rode, came into sight I knew you were on it.  And I—­cared—­for—­you—­before I ever saw you.”

“I don’t understand——­”

“I know you don’t. I don’t.  All I understand is that what you and I have done has been done by us before, sometime, somewhere—­part only—­ down to—­down to where you changed cars.  Up to that moment, before you took the Lexington Avenue car, I recognized each incident as it occurred....  But when all this happened to us before I must have lost courage—­for I did not recognize anything after that except that I cared for you.... Do you understand one single word of what I have been saying?”

The burning color in her face had faded slowly while he was speaking; her lifted eyes grew softer, serious, as he ended impetuously.

She looked at him in retrospective silence.  There was no mistaking his astonishing sincerity, his painfully earnest endeavor to impart to her some rather unusual ideas in which he certainly believed.  No man who looked that way at a woman could mean impertinence; her own intelligence satisfied her that he had not meant and could never mean offense to any woman.

“Tell me,” she said quietly, “just what you mean.  It is not possible for you to—­care—­for—­me....  Is it?”

He disclosed to her, beginning briefly with his own name, material and social circumstances, a pocket edition of his hitherto uneventful career, the advent that morning of the emissary from The Green Mouse, his discussion with Smith, the strange sensation which crept over him as he emerged from the tunnel at Forty-second Street, his subsequent altercation with Smith, and the events that ensued up to the eruption of Clarence.