ry cut us off from the house he stopped abruptly and
seized my arm. "What do you make of it?" he demanded.

"Make of what?" I asked.

"That girl!" he exclaimed testily.

"If you insist, I must avow that she's adorable, nothing else."

"Don't be a fool! You knew Raymond Bashford much better than I did, and
you know perfectly well he never married a young girl of that sort!
Those women are playing a trick, and I'm surprised that you don't see
through it."

"My uncle was a man of taste and a gentleman," I answered deliberately.
"There's nothing in the least improbable in his being infatuated with a
young woman of charm and wit like this girl. And it is hardly profitable
or decent to speculate as to her interest in him. You mustn't forget
that Uncle Bash was an unusual man, a man with whom a young girl might
easily fall in love without reference to his age or money or anything
else."

"I tell you it won't do," he insisted. "If either of those women at the
house is Raymond Bashford's widow, it's the one who calls herself
Farnsworth."

"You did your best to convict them of fraud the first jump out of the
box," I said, laughing at the recollection of his confusion when I
introduced him.

"My mistake was a natural one," he said defensively. "They're playing a
game of some kind and it's no laughing matter, but it won't take long to
find out what they're up to."

"You'll hardly go the length of having them arrested as imposters,
Torrence--not without some data to work on!"

"Certainly not. You seem to be hitting it off with both of them, but I
advise you to be on guard. Are you sure your uncle never sent you his
wife's photograph? That would have been a perfectly natural thing to
do."

"If I'd got a photograph, I should have headed for Japan, not for
France." I laughed, but I was thinking deeply. His line of reasoning as
to the incongruity of the marriage was not so different from my own that
I could sneer at his suspicions. Very convincingly, as became a
practical-minded man, he expanded his views as to the unlikelihood of my
uncle's marrying a girl but little beyond school age. I shrank from
telling him that I didn't care a hang whether the widow was a fraud or
not. If the two women who had settled themselves on the Barton estate
were imposters, they were extraordinarily daring and clever. My attitude
toward them was wholly defensive. If women of their quality were
perpetrating a fraud, I was for giving them ever