“How brilliant of you!  At least you can remember a ring.”

“I remember seeing the veil you wear once before—­at a certain little meeting between Mr. Orme and myself.”

“You seem to have been a haberdasher in your time, Mr. Cowles!  Your memory of a lady’s wearing apparel is very exact.  I should feel very much nattered.”  None the less I saw the dimple come in her cheek.

She was pulling on her glove as she spoke.  I saw embroidered on the gauntlet the figure of a red heart.

“My memory is still more exact in the matter of apparel,” said I.  “Miss Meriwether, is this your emblem indeed—­this red heart?  It seems to me I have also seen it somewhere before!”

The dimple deepened.  “When Columbus found America,” she answered, “it is said that the savages looked up and remarked to him, ’Ah, we see we are discovered!’”

“Yes,” said I, “you are fully discovered—­each of you—­all of you, all three or four of you, Miss Ellen Meriwether.”

“But you did not know it until now—­until this very moment.  You did not know me—­could not remember me—­not even when the masks were off!  Ah, it was good as a play!”

“I have done nothing else but remember you.”

“How much I should value your acquaintance, Mr. Cowles of Virginia!  How rare an opportunity you have given me of seeing on the inside of a man’s heart.”  She spoke half bitterly, and I saw that in one way or other she meant revenge.

“I do not understand you,” I rejoined.

“No, I suppose you men are all alike—­that any one of you would do the same.  It is only the last girl, the nearest girl, that is remembered.  Is it not so?”

“It is not so,” I answered.

“How long will you remember me this time—­me or my clothes, Mr. Cowles?  Until you meet another?”

“All my life,” I said; “and until I meet you again, in some other infinite variety.  Each last time that I see you makes me forget all the others; but never once have I forgotten you.”

“In my experience,” commented the girl, sagely, “all men talk very much alike.”

“Yes, I told you at the masked ball,” said I, “that sometime I would see you, masks off.  Was it not true?  I did not at first know you when you broke up my match with Orme, but I swore that sometime I would know you.  And when I saw you that night on the river, it seemed to me I certainly must have met you before—­have known you always—­and now—­”

“You had to study my rings and clothing to identify me with myself!”

“But you flatter me when you say that you knew me each time,” I ventured.  “I am glad that I have given you no occasion to prove the truth of your own statement, that I, like other men, am interested only in the last girl, the nearest girl.  You have had no reason—­”

“My experience with men,” went on this sage young person, “leads me to believe that they are the stupidest of all created creatures.  There was never once, there is never once, when a girl does not notice a man who is—­well, who is taking notice!”