d stopped well in the background.

"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a
conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you
are not to be able to recall the time and place!"

"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have
thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you
remember him the last time you went through the pass."

"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after
all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"--he did
not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and
proceeded as if she had not spoken--"it has never been out of my mind
that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the
question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each
other before?"

"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to
"this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night
before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.

"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind
of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"

She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her
eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.

"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do
come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection
with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I
met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"

"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to
rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips
apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs
and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.

"And _we_ met--_you_ and _I_!"

"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment
of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was
in earnest.

"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been
about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"

"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated.
"Five is very immature compared to six!"

"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my
emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such
bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road a