“Yes, I’ve got over it,” he said.

“And what was it?” she boldly pursued.

He was about to say, and then he could not.

“You won’t tell?”

“Not yet,” he answered.  He added, after a moment, “I don’t believe I can.”

“Because it’s confidential?”

“No; not exactly that.  Because it’s impossible.”

“Oh, that’s simple enough.  I understand exactly what you mean.  Well, if ever it becomes less difficult, remember that I should always like to know.  It seemed a little—­personal.”

“How in the world?”

“Well, when one is stared at in that way—­”

“Did I stare?”

“Don’t you always stare?  But in this case you stared as if there was something wrong with my hair.”

“There wasn’t,” Alford protested, simple-heartedly.  Then he recollected his sophistication to say:  “Unless its being of that particular shade between brown and red was wrong.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford!  After that I must believe you.”

They talked on the veranda till the night fell, and then they came in among the lamps, in the parlor, and she sat down with a certain provisionality, putting herself sideways on a light chair by a window, and as she chatted and laughed with one cheek towards him she now and then beat the back of her chair with her open hand.  The other people were reading or severely playing cards, and they, too, kept their tones down to a respectful level, while she lingered, and when she rose and said good-night he went out and took some turns on the veranda before going up to bed.  She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman, and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.

He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor.  Her half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted as if to beat the back of her chair.

“Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!” he said, in a sort of whispered shout, while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if to keep the fact to himself.  “What in the world are you doing here?”

Then she was not there.  Nothing was there; not even a chair beside the window.

Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood next the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless prey to the logic of the events.

It was at this point, which I have been able to give in Wanhope’s exact words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, as if he thought some detail might be denied him:  “And what was the logic of the events?”

Minver gave a fleering laugh.  “Don’t be premature, Rulledge.  If you have the logic now, you will spoil everything.  You can’t have the moral until you’ve had the whole story.  Go on, Wanhope.  You’re so much more interesting than usual that I won’t ask how you got hold of all these compromising minutiae.”