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By the time Alford had co-ordinated this reflection with the other, the eidolon had faded from the lady’s face, which again presented itself in uninterrupted loveliness with the added attraction of a distinct pout.

“Well, Mr. Alford!” she bantered him.

“Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking–“

“Not of what I was saying,” she broke in, laughingly, forgivingly.

“No, I certainly wasn’t,” he assented, with such a sense of approaching creepiness in his experience that when she challenged him to say what he was thinking of, he could not, or would not; she professed to believe that he would not.

In the joking that followed he soon lost the sense of approaching creepiness, and began to be proud of what had happened to him as out of the ordinary, as a species of psychological ecstasy almost of spiritual value. From time to time he tried, by thinking of the splash and upward gush from the cannon-shot’s plunge in the sea, to recall the vision, but it would not come again, and at the end of an afternoon somewhat distraughtly spent he decided to put the matter away, as one of the odd things of no significance which happen in life and must be dealt with as mysteries none the less trifling because they are inexplicable.

“Well, you’ve got over it?” the widow joked him as he drew up towards her, smiling from her rocker on the veranda after supper. At first, all the women in the hotel had petted him; but with their own cares and ailments to reclaim them they let the invalid fall to the peculiar charge of the childless widow who had nothing else to do, and was so well and strong that she could look after the invalid Professor of Archaeology (at the Champlain University) without the fatigues they must feel.

“Yes, I’ve got over it,” he said.

“And what was it?” she boldly pursued.

He was about to say, and then he could not.

“You won’t tell?”

“Not yet,” he answered. He added, after a moment, “I don’t believe I can.”

“Because it’s confidential?”

“No; not exactly that. Because it’s impossible.”

“Oh, that’s simple enough. I understand exactly what you mean. Well, if ever it becomes less difficult, remember that I should always like to know. It seemed a little–personal.”

“How in the world?”

“Well, when one is stared at in that way–“

“Did I stare?”

“Don’t you always stare? But in this case you stared as if there was something wrong with my hair.”

“There wasn’t,” Alford protested, simple-heartedly. Then he recollected his sophistication to say: “Unless its being of that particular shade between brown and red was wrong.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford! After that I must believe you.”

They talked on the veranda till the night fell, and then they came in among the lamps, in the parlor, and she sat down with a certain provisionality, putting herself sideways on a light chair by a window, and as she chatted and laughed with one cheek towards him she now and then beat the back of her chair with her open hand. The other people were reading or severely playing cards, and they, too, kept their tones down to a respectful level, while she lingered, and when she rose and said good-night he went out and took some turns on the veranda before going up to bed. She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman, and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.

He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor. Her half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted as if to beat the back of her chair.