which I might be
unable to report so definitely and clearly, he has Mr. Avery. He calls
us his eyes, sometimes; and it was only--only because I had been
commissioned to find out about you that I was obliged to show so much
curiosity."

"I understand," said Eaton quietly. "Your report to your father, I
suppose, convinced him that he had been mistaken in thinking he knew my
voice."

"No--not that. He knew that he had heard it; for sounds have so much
meaning to him that he never neglects or forgets them, and he carries
in his mind the voices of hundreds of different people and almost never
makes a mistake among them. It did make him surer that you were not
any one with whose voice he ought to have been familiar, but only some
one whom he had heard say something--a few words or sentences,
maybe--under conditions which impressed your voice upon his mind. And
he told Mr. Avery so, and that has only made Mr. Avery and the
conductor more certain that you must be the--one. And since you will
not tell--"

"To tell would only further confirm them--"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean they would be more certain it was I who--" Eaton, as he
blundered with the words and checked himself, looked up apprehensively
at Avery; but Avery, if he had thought that it was worth while to let
this conversation go on in the expectation that Eaton might let slip
something which could be used against himself, now had lost that
expectation.

"Come, Harry," he said.

Harriet arose, and Eaton got up as she did and stood as she went toward
the door.

"You said Mr. Avery and the conductor believe--" he began impulsively,
in answer to the something within him which was urging him to know, to
make certain, how far Harriet Santoine believed him to have been
concerned in the attack upon her father. And suddenly he found that he
did not need to ask. He knew; and with this sudden realization he all
at once understood why she had not been convinced in spite of the
conviction of the others--why, as, flushing and paling, she had just
now talked with him, her manner had been a continual denial of the
suspicion against him.

To Avery and to Connery the attack upon Santoine was made a vital and
important thing by the prominence of Santoine and their own
responsibility toward him, but after all there was nothing surprising
in there having been an attack. Even to Harriet Santoine it could not
be a matter of surprise; she knew--she must know--that