A beautiful woman asking, with those sweet, sensitive lips, for my friendship, looking at me with those calm, tender eyes, asking me to like her for her husband’s sake—­the sweetest, the most gracious, the most graceful picture I had ever seen.  Yet, oh, Heaven! a murderess, if ever there was one!  She wondered why I did not respond to her advances.  I read the wonder in her face.

“You do not care for hasty friends,” she said.  “Well, Lance and I are one; if you like him, you must like me, and time will show.”

“You are more than good to me,” I stammered, thinking in my heart if she had been but half as good to the little helpless child she flung into the sea.

I have never seen a woman more charming—­of more exquisite grace—­of more perfect accomplishment—­greater fascination of manner.  She sang to us, and her voice was full of such sweet pathos it almost brought the tears in my eyes.  I could not reconcile what I saw now with what I had seen on the Chain Pier, though outwardly the same woman I had seen on the Chain Pier and this graceful, gracious lady could not possibly be one.  As the evening passed on, and I saw her bright, cheerful ways, her devotion to her husband, her candid, frank open manner, I came to the conclusion that I must be the victim either of a mania or of some terrible mistake.  Was it possible, though, that I could have been?  Had I not had the face clearly, distinctly, before me for the past three years?

One thing struck me during the evening.  Watching her most narrowly, I could not see in her any under-current of feeling; she seemed to think what she said, and to say just what she thought; there were no musings, no reveries, no fits of abstraction, such as one would think would go always with sin or crime.  Her attention was given always to what was passing; she was not in the least like a person with anything weighing on her mind.  We were talking, Lance and I, of an old friend of ours, who had gone to Nice, and that led to a digression on the different watering places of England.  Lance mentioned several, the climate of which he declared was unsurpassed—­those mysterious places of which one reads in the papers, where violets grow in December, and the sun shines all the year round.  I cannot remember who first named Brighton, but I do remember that she neither changed color nor shrank.

“Now for a test,” I said to myself.  I looked at her straight in the face, so that no expression of hers could escape me—­no shadow pass over her eyes unknown to me.

“Do you know Brighton at all?” I asked her.  I could see to the very depths of those limpid eyes.  No shadow came; the beautiful, attentive face did not change in the least.  She smiled as she replied: 

“I do not.  I know Bournemouth and Eastbourne very well; I like Bournemouth best.”

We had hardly touched upon the subject, and she had glided from it, yet with such seeming unconsciousness.  I laughed, yet, I felt that my lips were stiff and the sound of my voice strange.