d see my pictures," he said.

His wife still held me fast. Whether he liked it or not, I had again
no choice but to answer her. "Some American girls, and some English," I
said.

Her eyes opened wider and wider in unutterable expectation. She suddenly
advanced her face so close to mine, that I felt her hot breath on my
cheeks as the next words burst their way through her lips.

"Born in England?"

"No. Born at Tadmor."

She dropped my arm. The light died out of her eyes in an instant. In
some inconceivable way, I had utterly destroyed some secret expectation
that she had fixed on me. She actually left me on the sofa, and took a
chair on the opposite side of the fireplace. Mr. Farnaby, turning paler
and paler, stepped up to her as she changed her place. I rose to look at
the pictures on the wall nearest to me. You remarked the extraordinary
keenness of my sense of hearing, while we were fellow passengers on the
steamship. When he stooped over her, and whispered in her ear, I heard
him--though nearly the whole breadth of the room was between us. "You
hell-cat!"--that was what Mr. Farnaby said to his wife.

The clock on the mantelpiece struck the half-hour after seven. In quick
succession, the guests at the dinner now entered the room.

I was so staggered by the extraordinary scene of married life which
I had just witnessed, that the guests produced only a very faint
impression upon me. My mind was absorbed in trying to find the true
meaning of what I had seen and heard. Was Mrs. Farnaby a little mad?
I dismissed that idea as soon as it occurred to me; nothing that I had
observed in her justified it. The truer conclusion appeared to be,
that she was deeply interested in some absent (and possibly lost) young
creature; whose age, judging by actions and tones which had sufficiently
revealed that part of the secret to me, could not be more than sixteen
or seventeen years. How long had she cherished the hope of seeing the
girl, or hearing of her? It must have been, anyhow, a hope very deeply
rooted, for she had been perfectly incapable of controlling herself
when I had accidentally roused it. As for her husband, there could be
no doubt that the subject was not merely distasteful to him, but so
absolutely infuriating that he could not even keep his temper, in the
presence of a third person invited to his house. Had he injured the girl
in any way? Was he responsible for her disappearance? Did his wife know
it, or only susp