It was while he was helping himself to this delicacy that Miriam got the first clear view of his face, half turned as it was toward her.  He seemed aware that she was observing him, for during the space of some seconds he held the silver implements idle in his hands, while he lifted his eyes to meet hers.  The look they exchanged was significant and long, and yet she was never quite sure that she recognized him then.  For the minute she was only conscious of a sudden, inward shock, to which she was unable to ascribe a cause.  Something had happened, though she knew not what.  Having in the course of a few minutes regained her self-control, she could only suppose that it was a repetition of that unreasoning panic which had now and then brought her to the verge of fainting, when by chance, in London, Paris, or New York, she caught a glimpse of some tall figure that carried her imagination back to the cabin in the Adirondacks.  She had always thought that he might appear in some crowd and take her by surprise.  She had never expected to find him in a gathering that could be called social.  Still less had she looked to meet him like this, with Philip Wayne who had sentenced him to death not three feet away.  The mere idea was preposterous.  And yet—­

She glanced at him again.  He was listening attentively while Mrs. Endsleigh Jarrott’s voice ran on: 

“People say our society has no traditions.  It has traditions.  It has the traditions of the country village, and it has never outgrown them.  We’re nothing but the country village writ large.  New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore—­we’re the country village over again, with its narrowness its sets, its timidity, all writ so large that they hide anything like a real society from us.  Now isn’t it so, Mr. Strange?  Don’t be afraid to give me your frank opinion because that’s what I’m asking for.”

Miriam herself made an effort to seem to be doing something that would enable her to sit unnoticed.  She was glad that Wayne was engaged by Mary Pole so that he could no longer listen to the voice that wakened his recollections.  She looked again at the tall, carefully dressed man beside her, so different in all his externals from anything she imagined Norrie Ford could ever become.  Norrie Ford was an outlaw and this was a man of the world.  She felt herself being reassured—­and yet disappointed.  Her first feeling of faintness passed away, enabling her to face the situation with greater calm.  Under cover of the energetic animation characteristic of every American dinner-party at which the guests are intimate, she had leisure to think over the one or two hints that were significant.  Now and then a remark was addressed to her across the table to which she managed to return a reply sufficiently apt to give her the appearance of being in touch with what was going on around her; but in reality she was taking in the fact, with the spirit rather than the mind, that Norrie Ford had returned.