I want to speak to you, and
I may as well do it now!" She pushed me into the office where Dudley did
his accounts--which was his name for sitting drinking all day, and never
speaking to any one--and shut the door. "Look here, Nicky, if you're
thinking that girl is a friend of mine, she isn't! I don't know one
thing about her. Except that this summer I had reason to oblige Dudley,
and one day he came to me--you know he was in New York for nearly two
months----"

I nodded. I had not cared where he was, so that he was away from La
Chance, where he and old Thompson would drive a tunnel just where I knew
it was useless.

"Well, he came to me in the first of August, and said he was going to
marry a girl called Paulette Brown,--and he wanted me to bring her out
here! Why he didn't marry her straight off and bring her out here
himself, I don't know; he only hummed and hawed when I asked him. But
anyhow, I met Paulette Brown, _for the first time_, at the station, when
we started up here--she and I and Dudley. And she puzzled me from the
second we got into the Pullman, and I saw her pull off the two veils
she'd worn around her head in the station! And she puzzles me worse
now."

"Why?" I might have been puzzled myself, remembering Paulette Brown's
speech to me in the dark, but it was none of Marcia's business.

"Because I know I've seen her before," Marcia returned calmly, "only
with no 'Paulette Brown' tacked on to her. I've seen her dance
somewhere, but I can't think _where_--and that's the first thing that
puzzles me."

"I don't see why," I said disagreeably, "considering that every one
dances somewhere all day long just now."

"It wasn't that kind of dancing. It was rather--wonderful! And there was
some story tacked on to it," Marcia frowned, "only I can't think what!
And the second thing that puzzles me about Paulette Brown--I tell you,
Nicky, I believe she can't _bear_ Dudley, and that she doesn't want to
marry him!"

It was the first decent thing I had heard from her, and I could have
opened my mouth and cheered. But I said, "Then why's she here?"

"Just because it suits her for some reason of her own," Marcia was
earnest as I had never seen her. "Nicky, I don't think she's anything in
the world but some sort of an adventuress--only what I can't understand
about her is what she wants of Dudley! It isn't money, for I know he's
tried to make her take it, and she wouldn't. Yet I know, too, that she
hadn't a cent co