He grinned sheepishly.  If she knew that her Billie, alias Shaver, was not with her husband at his father’s house, she would not be dallying in this fashion.  And if the young father, who painted pictures, and left notes in his studio in a blind faith that his wife would find them,—­if that trusting soul knew that Billie was asleep in a house all of whose inmates had done penance behind prison bars, he would very quickly become a man of action.  The Hopper had never heard of such careless parenthood!  These people were children!  His heart warmed to them in pity and admiration, as it had to little Billie.

“I forgot to ask you whether you are armed,” she remarked, with just as much composure as though she were asking him whether he took two lumps of sugar in his tea; and then she added, “I suppose I ought to have asked you that in the first place.”

“I gotta gun in my coat—­right side,” he confessed.  “An’ that’s all I got,” he added, batting his eyes under the spell of her bewildering smile.

With her left hand she cautiously extracted his revolver and backed away with it to the table.

“If you’d lied to me I should have killed you; do you understand?”

“Yes’m,” murmured The Hopper meekly.

She had spoken as though homicide were a common incident of her life, but a gleam of humor in the eyes she was watching vigilantly abated her severity.

“You may sit down—­there, please!”

She pointed to a much bepillowed davenport and The Hopper sank down on it, still with his hands up.  To his deepening mystification she backed to the windows and lowered the shades, and this done she sat down with the table between them, remarking,—­

“You may put your hands down now, Mr. ——?”

He hesitated, decided that it was unwise to give any of his names; and respecting his scruples she said with great magnanimity:—­

“Of course you wouldn’t want to tell me your name, so don’t trouble about that.”

She sat, wholly tranquil, her arms upon the table, both hands caressing the small automatic, while his own revolver, of different pattern and larger caliber, lay close by.  His status was now established as that of a gentleman making a social call upon a lady who, in the pleasantest manner imaginable and yet with undeniable resoluteness, kept a deadly weapon pointed in the general direction of his person.

A clock on the mantel struck eleven with a low, silvery note.  Muriel waited for the last stroke and then spoke crisply and directly.

“We were speaking of that letter I left lying here on the table.  You didn’t understand it, of course; you couldn’t—­not really.  So I will explain it to you.  My husband and I married against our fathers’ wishes; both of them were opposed to it.”

She waited for this to sink into his perturbed consciousness.  The Hopper frowned and leaned forward to express his sympathetic interest in this confidential disclosure.