d.

Just as we reached the top of the stairs, as I was about to follow
them into one of the small supper rooms, like a flash, as if I were
suddenly waking from a dream into conscious, with exactly the same
sensation I have experienced many and many a morning when struggling
back to life from sleep, I realized that the slender figure before me
was as familiar as my own hand.

As the door closed behind us, I called her by name--and my voice
startled even myself.

She threw back the hood of her cape and faced me.

Rodriguez had heard, too. He wheeled quickly toward us, as nearly
broken from his self-control as a man so sure of himself could be.

Under the flash of our eyes the color surged up painfully in her pale
face. There was much the same expression in our eyes, I
fancy,--Rodriguez's and mine--but I felt that it was at his face she
gazed.

I have never known how far it is given to woman to penetrate the
mysteries of human nature, for she is gifted, it seems to me, with a
dissimulation in which she wraps herself, as with an impenetrable veil
of outward innocence, and ignorance, from our less acute perception
and ruder knowledge.

There were speeches enough that it would have become a man in my
position to make. I knew them all. But--I said nothing. Some instinct
saved me; some vague fore-knowledge made me feel--I knew not why--that
there was really nothing for me to say at that moment.

For fully a minute none of us moved.

Rodriguez recovered himself first. I cannot describe the peculiar
expression of his eyes as he slowly turned them from her face to mine.
So bound up was he in himself that I was confident that he did not yet
suspect more than that she and I had met before. What was in her mind
I dared not guess.

He composedly crossed to her. He gently unfastened her heavy wrap,
carefully lifted it from her shoulders. He pushed a high backed chair
toward her, and, with a smile, forced her to sit--she did look
dangerously white. She sank into it, and wearily leaned her pretty
head back, as if for support, and I noticed that her slender hands, as
they grasped either arm of the chair, trembled, in spite of the grip
she took to steady herself. I felt her whole body vibrate, as a
violin vibrates for a moment after the bow leaves the strings.

"It is a strange chance that you two should know each other," he said,
"and very well, too, if I may judge from your manner of addressing
her?"

I moved to a place