ing, and now this Mr. Vivian. She was
very tired of being dogged and nagged at and interfered with, and she
wanted very much to terminate this interview, which she saw now had been
extorted from her by a pretty sharp piece of deception. And through her
mind there skipped a beckoning thought of Mr. Canning, conceived as
feverishly pacing the piazza ...

"You see, his defence," Mr. Vivian was saying, with some signs of
nervousness, "is merely his own word that he had no idea you were upset.
I believe him absolutely, because I know he wouldn't lie, and he admits,
to his own disadvantage, that his memory isn't at all clear. But--it's
all so muddled and confused somehow--I'm afraid everybody else will
think that a rather silly fabrication, invented by a desperate man to
put himself in the best light possible. That is--unless his word is
corroborated."

His inflection invited remarks, nay, urged them, but there was only
silence.

And then within V. Vivian, M.D., there woke a cold doubt, and gnawed
him.

"Miss Heth--I must ask--for the whole moral question hangs on this ...
_Did he know that you were upset_?"

Miss Heth cleared her throat, preparatory to rising. She saw now that
she ought never to have consented to talk with this strange man at all.
Mamma would have known that in advance.

"It is--rather absurd--for me to be asked to decide what _he_ knew. He
has assured you that--"

"But--I don't make myself clear, I see--the fact is that yours is the
only assurance that will carry the smallest weight on that point.... He
wasn't--may I ask?--actually _in_ the boat when it went over, was he?"

"N-no. As to that--I believe he had just got out, but--"

"Did you think at the time that he knew you were upset?"

"Unfortunately, I am not a mind reader," she began with dignity,
objecting seriously to these obstacles in the way of ending the
interview. "Thrown without warning into the water, I could not look into
his thoughts and see--"

"Quite so. But did he show in any way that he knew you were upset?"

A kind of chill had crept into the stranger's voice. The two young
people gazed at each other. The man had strange eyes (they were the
third thing she had noticed about him), gray, she thought, and gifted
with an odd sort of translucence, singular and speaking.

"Let me see. No, he did not. That is what I said at the time--that he
didn't take the slightest notice of me--"

"He swears he never dreamed anything was wr