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“Well, it’s YOU, anyway–and you can’t get out of it.”

As he still stared at her, in her inconsistent finery, draggled and wet by the storm, at her limp ribbons and ostentatious jewelry, she continued, in the same hard voice,–

“I thought I spotted you once or twice before; but you took no notice of me, and I reckoned I was mistaken. But this afternoon at the Temple of Music”–

“Where?” said James Smith harshly.

“At the Temple–the San Francisco Troupe performance–where you brushed by me, and I heard your voice saying, ‘Beg pardon!’ I says, ‘That’s Jim Farendell.'”

“Farendell!” burst out James Smith, half in simulated astonishment, half in real alarm.

“Well! Smith, then, if you like better,” said the woman impatiently; “though it’s about the sickest and most played-out dodge of a name you could have pitched upon. James Smith, Don Diego Smith!” she repeated, with a hysteric laugh. “Why, it beats the nigger minstrels all hollow! Well, when I saw you there, I said, ‘That’s Jim Farendell, or his twin brother;’ I didn’t say ‘his ghost,’ mind you; for, from the beginning, even before I knew it all, I never took any stock in that fool yarn about your burnt bones being found in your office.”

“Knew all, knew what?” demanded the man, with a bravado which he nevertheless felt was hopeless.

She rose, crossed the room, and, standing before him, placed one hand upon her hip as she looked at him with half-pitying effrontery.

“Look here, Jim,” she began slowly, “do you know what you’re doing? Well, you’re making me tired!” In spite of himself, a half- superstitious thrill went through him as her words and attitude recalled the dead Scranton. “Do you suppose that I don’t know that you ran away the night of the fire? Do you suppose that I don’t know that you were next to ruined that night, and that you took that opportunity of skedaddling out of the country with all the money you had left, and leaving folks to imagine you were burnt up with the books you had falsified and the accounts you had doctored! It was a mean thing for you to do to me, Jim, for I loved you then, and would have been fool enough to run off with you if you’d told me all, and not left me to find out that you had lost MY money– every cent Cutler had left me in the business–with the rest.”

With the fatuousness of a weak man cornered, he clung to unimportant details. “But the body was believed to be mine by every one,” he stammered angrily. “My papers and books were burnt,–there was no evidence.”

“And why was there not?” she said witheringly, staring doggedly in his face. “Because I stopped it! Because when I knew those bones and rags shut up in that office weren’t yours, and was beginning to make a row about it, a strange man came to me and said they were the remains of a friend of his who knew your bankruptcy and had come that night to warn you,–a man whom you had half ruined once, a man who had probably lost his life in helping you away. He said if I went on making a fuss he’d come out with the whole truth–how you were a thief and a forger, and”–she stopped.

“And what else?” he asked desperately, dreading to hear his wife’s name next fall from her lips.

“And that–as it could be proved that his friend knew your secrets,” she went on in a frightened, embarrassed voice, “you might be accused of making away with him.”

For a moment James Smith was appalled; he had never thought of this. As in all his past villainy he was too cowardly to contemplate murder, he was frightened at the mere accusation of it. “But,” he stammered, forgetful of all save this new terror, “he KNEW I wouldn’t be such a fool, for the man himself told me Duffy had the papers, and killing him wouldn’t have helped me.”