caught the faint aroma of a strange perfume.  Between him and the light hung a filmy veil of smoke.  He knew that it had come from a cigarette.  There was an uneasy note in Miss Kirkstone’s voice as she invited him to hang his coat and hat on an old-fashioned rack near the door.  He took his time, trying to recall where he had detected that perfume before.  He remembered, with a sort of shock.  It was after Shan Tung had left McDowell’s office.

She was smiling when he turned, and apologizing again for making her unusual request that day.

“It was—­quite unconventional.  But I felt that you would understand, Mr. Conniston.  I guess I didn’t stop to think.  And I am afraid of lightning, too.  But I wanted to see you.  I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow to hear about what happened up there.  Is it—­so strange?”

Afterward he could not remember just what sort of answer he made.  She turned, and he followed her through the big, square-cut door leading out of the hall.  It was the same door with the great, sliding panel he had locked on that fateful night, years ago, when he had fought with her father and brother.  In it, for a moment, her slim figure was profiled in a frame of vivid light.  Her mother must have been beautiful.  That was the thought that flashed upon him as the room and its tragic memory lay before him.  Everything came back to him vividly, and he was astonished at the few changes in it.  There was the big chair with its leather arms, in which the overfatted creature who had been her father was sitting when he came in.  It was the same table, too, and it seemed to him that the same odds and ends were on the mantel over the cobblestone fireplace.  And there was somebody’s picture of the Madonna still hanging between two windows.  The Madonna, like the master of the house, had been too fat to be beautiful.  The son, an ogreish pattern of his father, had stood with his back to the Madonna, whose overfat arms had seemed to rest on his shoulders.  He remembered that.

The girl was watching him closely when he turned toward her.  He had frankly looked the room over, without concealing his intention.  She was breathing a little unsteadily, and her hair was shimmering gloriously in the light of an overhead chandelier.  She sat down with that light over her, motioning him to be seated opposite her—­across the same table from which he had snatched the copper weight that had killed Kirkstone.  He had never seen anything quite so steady, quite so beautiful as her eyes when they looked across at him.  He thought of McDowell’s suspicion and of Shan Tung and gripped himself hard.  The same strange perfume hung subtly on the air he was breathing.  On a small silver tray at his elbow lay the ends of three freshly burned cigarettes.

“Of course you remember this room?”

He nodded.  “Yes.  It was night when I came, like this.  The next day I went after John Keith.”

She leaned toward him, her hands clasped in front of her on the table.  “You will tell me the truth about John Keith?” she asked in a low, tense voice.  “You swear that it will be the truth?”