s in
evening dress, which clung to her in soft lines of unspeakable grace. At
her throat hung a string of pearls--the same pearls--and as she paused
and our eyes met, I could have sworn that her muscles grew momentarily
taut, and her lips twitched in a gasp. She put out one hand and steadied
herself against the door jamb; then with the gracious recognition of a
half-smile for a guest not yet duly presented, she went over and
unlocked the desk.

I stood looking after her. I was conscious of a numbness of spirit--a
sickening of hopelessness. The question was answered. The Frances of my
Island, the Frances of Maxwell's heartbreak, the Frances who had married
my business associate, were, by a monstrous sequence of hideous
circumstances and coincidence, one and the same. She stood ten feet and
twenty sky depths away from me.

CHAPTER XVI

AN INTERVIEW AND A CRISIS

As I stood there all immediate things were apparitions seen vague and
distorted through a chaos of wild emotion. I had assumed that for an
experimenter in the unexpected I could qualify as tried and seasoned.
Now it seemed that all prior assaults upon my equanimity had been mere
kindergarten exercises in control.

Weighborne, still too self-absorbed to see that worlds were crumbling in
his library, turned suddenly to us with an apologetic laugh.

"Frances," he said, "forgive me, I entirely forgot to present our
guest." Even then he did not present me, but turned to me to add, "We've
talked of you so much here, Mr. Deprayne, that I had overlooked the fact
that introductions were in order. I'm the unfortunate type of one idea
at a time. After all, I hope you'll feel that, having crossed the
threshold you are one of us, and that further formalities may be
dispensed with." Then as I bowed, somewhat incoherently mumbling my
acknowledgments, he turned his back upon the room and busied himself
again with the rubbish that claimed his interest at the desk.

I wanted to leap for his throat. I, who had presented her as a goddess
to a people under skies that rose from the ocean and dipped again to the
ocean, needed no presentation. The casual fashion of his amenities was
in itself an affront.

Of course all this was insanely unfair to my host, and even while my
thoughts seethed in this unamiable vortex--so strong is the grip of
artificial conventions--I was attempting to smile with the agreeable
inanity of a drawing-room smirk.

But as she stood there I co