She shot a fleeting glance at me.

“No,” she agreed, “you haven’t!  If you don’t mind my saying so, I think they would have been out of place.  At Bleau, for instance, and at Prezelay I hadn’t much time for eating bonbons; but after all you did me one or two more practical services, Mr. Bayne.”

“Nothing,” I maintained, my gloom unabated, “that amounted to a row of pins.  Though I might have shone, I’ll admit; I can see that, looking back.  The opportunity was there, but the man was lacking.  I might have been a real movie hero, cool, resourceful, dependable, clear-sighted, a tower of strength; and what I did was to muddle things up hopelessly and waste time in suspecting you and seize every opportunity of trusting people who positively spread their guilt before my eyes.”

“I don’t know.”  She was looking at the lake, not at me, and she was smiling.  “There were one or two little matters that have slipped your mind, perhaps.  Take the very first night we met, when you tracked your thief to my room and wouldn’t let the hotel people come in to search it.  Don’t you think, on the whole, that you were rather kind?”

“I couldn’t have driven them in,” I declared stubbornly, “with a pitchfork.  I couldn’t have persuaded them to make a search if I had prayed them on my bended knees.  Their one idea was to help the fellow in what the best criminal circles call a getaway; and when I think how I must have been wool-gathering, not to guess—­”

“Well, even so,”—­Miss Falconer was still smiling—­“weren’t you very nice on the steamer?  About the extra, I mean.  And at Gibraltar, too, when they asked you what you had thrown overboard—­do you remember how you kept silent and never even glanced my way?”

“No,” I groaned, “I don’t; but I remember our trip to Paris.  I remember marching you into the wagon-restaurant like a hand-cuffed criminal, and sitting you down at a table, and bullying you like a Russian czar.  I gave you three days to leave France.  Have you forgotten?  I haven’t.  The one thing I omitted—­and I don’t see how I missed it—­was to call the gendarmes there at Modane and denounce you to them.  It’s more than kind of you to glide over my imbecilities; I appreciate it.  But when I think of that evening I want a nice, deep, dark dungeon, somewhere underground, to hide.”

“I think,” she murmured consolingly, “that you made amends to me later.”  Her face was averted, but I could see a distracting dimple in her cheek.  “You mustn’t forget that I haven’t been perfect, either.  When you followed me to Bleau, and I came down the stairs and saw you, I misunderstood the situation entirely and was as unpleasant as I could be.”

“Naturally,” I acquiesced with dark meaning.  “How could you have understood it?  How could any human being have fathomed the mental processes that sent me there?  I only wonder that instead of giving me what-for, you didn’t murder me.  Any United States jury would have acquitted you with the highest praise.”