She guessed that he was about to make up a new story.  He must have had time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence.  But she welcomed any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of their meeting.  She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they were alone together on the pass.  Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by.  Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.

“You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a conviction that you have met him before!” he began.  “How exasperated you are not to be able to recall the time and place!”

“Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?” she asked.  “He must have thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you remember him the last time you went through the pass.”

“Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur.  But”—­he did not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and proceeded as if she had not spoken—­“it has never been out of my mind that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the question that has kept recurring to me:  Where had he and I seen each other before?”

“Well?” she said curiously, recalling her father’s repeated allusions to “this Wingfield,” his strange depression after Jack had left the night before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.

“I said nothing about it, nor did he.  I wonder if it has not been a kind of contest between us as to which should be the first to say ‘Tag!’”

She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.

“I knew it would come!” he went on, with dramatic fervor.  “Such things do come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind.  It was in Florence that he and I met!  In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!”

“Florence!  The road to Fiesole!” Mary repeated; and the names seemed to rouse in her a rapturous recollection.  She leaned forward now, her lips apart, her eyes glowing.  In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.

“And we met—­you and I!”

“We?” Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was in earnest.

“Yes.  I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been about a year younger.  Do you remember it at all?”

“No!” She was silent, concentrated, groping.  “No, no!” she repeated.  “Five is very immature compared to six!”