a window.

Over in a corner half a dozen boys on their way back to school were
ragging a perspiring waiter, a proceeding so exactly to McKnight's taste
that he insisted on going over to join them. But their table was full,
and somehow that kind of fun had lost its point for me.

Not far from us a very stout, middle-aged man, apoplectic with the heat,
was elephantinely jolly for the benefit of a bored-looking girl across
the table from him, and at the next table a newspaper woman ate alone,
the last edition propped against the water-bottle before her, her hat,
for coolness, on the corner of the table. It was a motley Bohemian
crowd.

I looked over the room casually, while McKnight ordered the meal. Then
my attention was attracted to the table next to ours. Two people were
sitting there, so deep in conversation that they did not notice us. The
woman's face was hidden under her hat, as she traced the pattern of the
cloth mechanically with her fork. But the man's features stood out clear
in the light of the candles on the table. It was Bronson!

"He shows the strain, doesn't he?" McKnight said, holding up the wine
list as if he read from it. "Who's the woman?"

"Search me," I replied, in the same way.

When the chicken came, I still found myself gazing now and then at the
abstracted couple near me. Evidently the subject of conversation was
unpleasant. Bronson was eating little, the woman not at all. Finally he
got up, pushed his chair back noisily, thrust a bill at the waiter and
stalked out.

The woman sat still for a moment; then, with an apparent resolution to
make the best of it, she began slowly to eat the meal before her.

But the quarrel had taken away her appetite, for the mixture in our
chafing-dish was hardly ready to serve before she pushed her chair back
a little and looked around the room.

I caught my first glimpse of her face then, and I confess it startled
me. It was the tall, stately woman of the Ontario, the woman I had
last seen cowering beside the road, rolling pebbles in her hand, blood
streaming from a cut over her eye. I could see the scar now, a little
affair, about an inch long, gleaming red through its layers of powder.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she turned and looked directly at me.
After a minute's uncertainty, she bowed, letting her eyes rest on mine
with a calmly insolent stare. She glanced at McKnight for a moment, then
back to me. When she looked away again I breathed easier.