you've been hurt!" she exclaimed, noting the gash upon
his forehead. A strip of tissue-paper (in lieu of court-plaster) lay
soaking upon the wound: a trick learned in the old days when razors
grew dull over night.

"Hurt? Oh, I ran against something when I wasn't looking," he
explained lamely. Then he added eagerly: "I did not know that you were
on this gallery. First time I've put up at a hotel in years." It did
not serve.

"You have been fighting! Your hand!"

He looked at the hand dumbly. How keen her eyes were.

"I know!"

"You do?" inanely.

"Was it . . . Mallow?"

"Yes."

"Did you . . . whip him?"

"I . . . did," imitating her tone and hesitance. It was the wisest
thing he could have done, for it relaxed the nerves of both of them.

Elsa smiled, smiled and forgot the substance of all her rehearsals,
forgot the letter of credit, warm with the heat of her heart. "I am a
pagan," she confessed.

"And I am a barbarian. I ought to be horribly ashamed of myself."

"But you are not?"

For a moment their eyes drew. Hers were like dark whirlpools, and he
felt himself drifting helplessly, irresistibly. He dropped his hands
upon the railing and gripped; the illusion of fighting a current was
almost real to him. Every fiber in his body cried out against the
struggle.

"No, not in the least," he said, looking toward the sunset. "Fighting
is riff-raff business, and I'm only a riff-raffer at best."

"Rather, aren't you Paul Ellison, brother, twin brother, of the man I
said I was going home to marry?"

How far away her voice seemed! The throb in his forehead and the dull
ache over his heart, where some of the sledge-hammer blows had gone
home, he no longer felt.

"Don't deny it. It would be useless. Knowing your brother as I do,
who could doubt it?"

He remained dumb.

"I couldn't understand, just simply couldn't. They never told me; in
all the years I have known them, in all the years I have partly made
their home my own, there was nothing. Not a trinket. Once I saw a
camera-picture. I know now why Arthur snatched it from my hand. It
was you. You were bending over an engineer's tripod. Even now I
should have doubted had I not recalled what you said one day on board,
that you had built bridges. Arthur couldn't build anything stronger
than an artist's easel. You are Paul Ellison."

"I am sorry you found out."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted to be no more than an incident in your