I had not even noted the direction we were taking, until I found that we had stopped in front of a French restaurant, one of the few Bohemian resorts the town boasted.

Rodriguez leaped out, assisted the lady, and I followed.

Just as we reached the top of the stairs, as I was about to follow them into one of the small supper rooms, like a flash, as if I were suddenly waking from a dream into conscious, with exactly the same sensation I have experienced many and many a morning when struggling back to life from sleep, I realized that the slender figure before me was as familiar as my own hand.

As the door closed behind us, I called her by name—­and my voice startled even myself.

She threw back the hood of her cape and faced me.

Rodriguez had heard, too.  He wheeled quickly toward us, as nearly broken from his self-control as a man so sure of himself could be.

Under the flash of our eyes the color surged up painfully in her pale face.  There was much the same expression in our eyes, I fancy,—­Rodriguez’s and mine—­but I felt that it was at his face she gazed.

I have never known how far it is given to woman to penetrate the mysteries of human nature, for she is gifted, it seems to me, with a dissimulation in which she wraps herself, as with an impenetrable veil of outward innocence, and ignorance, from our less acute perception and ruder knowledge.

There were speeches enough that it would have become a man in my position to make.  I knew them all.  But—­I said nothing.  Some instinct saved me; some vague fore-knowledge made me feel—­I knew not why—­that there was really nothing for me to say at that moment.

For fully a minute none of us moved.

Rodriguez recovered himself first.  I cannot describe the peculiar expression of his eyes as he slowly turned them from her face to mine.  So bound up was he in himself that I was confident that he did not yet suspect more than that she and I had met before.  What was in her mind I dared not guess.

He composedly crossed to her.  He gently unfastened her heavy wrap, carefully lifted it from her shoulders.  He pushed a high backed chair toward her, and, with a smile, forced her to sit—­she did look dangerously white.  She sank into it, and wearily leaned her pretty head back, as if for support, and I noticed that her slender hands, as they grasped either arm of the chair, trembled, in spite of the grip she took to steady herself.  I felt her whole body vibrate, as a violin vibrates for a moment after the bow leaves the strings.

“It is a strange chance that you two should know each other,” he said, “and very well, too, if I may judge from your manner of addressing her?”

I moved to a place behind her chair, and laid my hand on it.  “This lady is my affianced wife,” I replied.

He did not change color.  For an instant not a muscle moved.  He did not stir a step from his place before the fire, where he stood, with his gaze fixed on her face.  For one instant he turned his widely opened eyes on me—­brief as the glance was, I felt it was critical.  Then his lids quivered and drooped completely over his eyes, absolutely veiling the whole man, and, to my amazement, he laughed aloud.