He spoke in his most careful attorney’s manner, frank, concise, convincing, free from any exaggeration of excitement or emotion.  And she listened, alternately fascinated and appalled as, step by step, his story unfolded the links in an apparently inexorable sequence involving this young man and herself in a predestined string of episodes not yet ended—­ if she permitted herself to credit this astounding story.

Sensitively intelligent, there was no escaping the significance of the only possible deduction.  She drew it and blushed furiously.  For a moment, as the truth clamored in her brain, the self-evidence of it stunned her.  But she was young, and the shamed recoil came automatically.  Incredulous, almost exasperated, she raised her head to confront him; the red lips parted in outraged protest—­parted and remained so, wordless, silent—­the soundless, virginal cry dying unuttered on a mouth that had imperceptibly begun to tremble.

Her head sank slowly; she laid her white hands above the roses heaped in her lap.

For a long while she remained so.  And he did not speak.

First the butler went away.  Then Mr. Quinn followed.  The maid had not yet arrived.  The house was very still.

And after the silence had worn his self-control to the breaking point he rose and walked to the dining room and stood looking down into the yard.  The grass out there was long and unkempt; roses bloomed on the fence; wistaria, in its deeper green of midsummer, ran riot over the trellis where Clarence had basely dodged his lovely mistress, and, after making a furry pin wheel of himself, had fled through the airhole into Stygian depths.

Somewhere above, in the silent house, Clarence was sulkily dissembling.

“I suppose,” said Brown, quietly coming back to where the girl was sitting in the golden dusk, “that I might as well find Clarence while we are waiting for your maid.  May I go up and look about?”

And taking her silence as assent, he started upstairs.

He hunted carefully, thoroughly, opening doors, peeping under furniture, investigating clothespresses, listening at intervals, at intervals calling with misleading mildness.  But, like him who died in malmsey, Clarence remained perjured and false to all sentiments of decency so often protested purringly to his fair young mistress.

Mechanically Brown opened doors of closets, knowing, if he had stopped to think, that cats don’t usually turn knobs and let themselves into tightly closed places.

In one big closet on the fifth floor, however, as soon as he opened the door there came a rustle, and he sprang forward to intercept the perfidious one; but it was only the air stirring the folds of garments hanging on the wall.

As he turned to step forth again the door gently closed with an ominous click, shutting him inside.  And after five minutes’ frantic fussing he realized that he was imprisoned by a spring lock at the top of a strange house, inhabited only by a cat and a bewildered young girl, who might, at any moment now that the telephone was in order, call a cab and flee from a man who had tried to explain to her that they were irrevocably predestined for one another.