anding this
gesture, took the chair from her and set it as Santoine's motion had
directed; then he waited for her to seat herself in one of the other
chairs.

"Am I to remain, Father?" she asked.

"Yes," Santoine commanded.

Eaton waited while she went to a chair at the foot of the bed and
seated herself--her clasped hands resting on the footboard and her chin
upon her hands--in a position to watch both Eaton and her father while
they talked; then Eaton sat down.

"Good morning, Eaton," the blind man greeted him.

"Good morning, Mr. Santoine," Eaton answered; he understood by now that
Santoine never began a conversation until the one he was going to
address himself to had spoken, and that Santoine was able to tell, by
the sound of the voice, almost as much of what was going on in the mind
of one he talked with as a man with eyes is able to tell by studying
the face. He continued to wait quietly, therefore, glancing up once to
Harriet Santoine, whose eyes for an instant met his; then both regarded
again the face of the blind man on the bed.

Santoine was lying quietly upon his back, his head raised on the
pillows, his arms above the bed-covers, his finger-tips touching with
the fingers spread.

"You recall, of course, Eaton, our conversation on the train," Santoine
said evenly.

"Yes."

"And so you remember that I gave you at that time four possible
reasons--as the only possible ones--why you had taken the train I was
on. I said you must have taken it to attack me, or to protect me from
attack; to learn something from me, or to inform me of something; and I
eliminated as incompatible with the facts, the second of these--I said
you could not have taken it to protect me."

"Yes."

"Very well; the reason I have sent for you now is that, having
eliminated to-day still another of those possibilities,--leaving only
two,--I want to call your attention in a certain order to some of the
details of what happened on the train."

"You say that to-day you have eliminated another of the possibilities?"
Eaton asked uneasily.

"To-day, yes; of course. You had rather a close call this morning, did
you not?"

"Rather, I was careless."

"You were careless?" Santoine smiled derisively. "Perhaps you were--in
one sense. In another, however, you have been very careful, Eaton.
You have been careful to act as though the attempt to run you down
could not have been a deliberate attack; you were careful to call it an
acc