easing and confidential nature
to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing
the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted cafe--she recognized the
facade of the place where they had found the orangeades so
disappointing--and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the
camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she
was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his
lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round
table with a wine bottle and glasses in front of them and behind them a
background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a
distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear
view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden
structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the
very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.

That was all--merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and
yet on the face of them they told a damning and a condemning story.

She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent
of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling
before it came crashing down.

"Oh, but this is too horrible for words!" the distressed lady cried
out. "How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow
us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It's monstrous!"

"Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising attitudes--you admit
that?"

"You twist my words to give them a false meaning!" she exclaimed. "You
are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong
light. I can explain--why, the whole thing is so simple when you
understand."

"Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge--I'm all
for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every
standpoint."

So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in
such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the
vanished Mr. Murrill--how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and
left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what
followed--all of it she told him, withholding nothing.

He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her
closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint,
depended.

"Well," he said, "if that's the way this thing happened and i