e sure--Ewing."

"You know he's been staying a fortnight with us at Kensington."

He nodded a gracious assent, still waiting, still veiled with an effect
that aroused all her caution.

"He came back to town yesterday."

"He must have enjoyed the place immensely. I'm nowhere so strongly
reminded of rural England, saving the architecture, of course. Ewing
painted, doubtless?"

"Oh, no, he did nothing. He played with my sister, chiefly. Virginia
took him about. They were inseparable. He had heart for nothing but
her--no work, nothing else." She had deliberately lengthened the speech,
wishing him not to see that she watched for an opening. Teevan seemed to
feel a leading. He searched her face as he asked:

"They liked each other immensely, eh?"

"Oh, yes, I couldn't tell you----"

He felt the weariness of her tone, almost a faintness. The color burned
darkly high on her cheeks, her eyes showed an exotic and painful
splendor. He suddenly saw that she must have sustained some blow; that
her luster was a fevered glitter sad and terrible, and that she was
nerving herself to some ordeal. He sank back in his seat, all acuteness.
Had she betrayed herself in the beginning, struck open the secret for
him by her first words? A jealous woman, then--a flouted woman come to
turn on the man? It was no conclusion to leap at; rather a piquant
suspicion to verify.

He set his glass down and picked up a slender-bladed dagger from the
desk before him, absently bending the steel. He knew they were both
veiled for the moment. His eyes challenged her to open speech of Ewing
as he held the dagger up to her and said lazily, "A beauty,
that--undoubted Toledo work. Picked it up in a shop at Newport
yesterday. They knew how to temper steel in those days. See its edge--"
He tore a bit of paper from a pad and slashed it into strips, his eyes
rising to hers at each cut, interrogatory, through the complacence of a
man exhibiting a fine property.

"Randall, you've been friendly with him, and yet you know who he is;
you've known it a long time. And you--you _can't_ like him."

He still toyed with his plaything, prickling its needle-like point into
the pad of paper under his hand. Then he turned on her with a sudden,
insinuating droop of the eyelids.

"Very well--and you've been friendly with him, say until two weeks ago.
And you're no longer so. I name no reason. But you detest him now. Am I
wrong? Can I still read a woman?" He leaned toward