"A lady of whose integrity I am as sure as I am of yours. That's the odd part of it. Besides, you are both of you too clever to plagiarize, even if you weren't too honest. The mere similarity of theme isn't so strange; that happens often enough; but that the title of the stories should be identical, and that in each the heroine should be named May--" "Is her heroine named May?" I interrupted in astonishment; "why, then, she must have seen my copy; or," I added, a new thought striking me, "she must have got the name in the same way I did. I took the title of the story and the name of the heroine from a line of Swinburne, and--" "And," interrupted the editor in turn, catching up the manuscript before him, "so did she." And he showed me, written at the head of the page:-- "If you were April's lady, and I were lord of May." "Well," I remarked, with a not unnatural mingling of philosophy and annoyance, "it is all of a piece with my theory that ideas are in the air, and belong, like wild geese, to whoever catches them first; but it is vexatious, when I captured a fancy that particularly pleased me, to find that some woman or other has been smart enough to get salt on its tail-feathers before I did." Mr. Lane smiled at my desperate air, and at that moment his little office-boy, whom I particularly detest because of the catlike stillness and suddenness of his movements, silently produced first himself and then a card. "'Agnes Graham,'" read Mr. Lane. "Here is your rival to speak for herself. I hope you don't mind seeing her?" "Oh, by no means," I replied rather ungraciously. "Let us see what she is like, and what she will have to say about this puzzle." The name was not wholly new to me, as I had seen it signed to various magazine articles, concerning which at this moment I had only the most vague and general idea. I was sitting with my back to the door, and in rising I still kept my face half turned away from the lady who entered, but I saw the reflection of her face in a mirror opposite without any sense of recognition. As she advanced a step or two, however, and half passed me, I knew her. The delicate ear, the fine sweep of the neck, the knot of golden brown hair, were all familiar. It was the lady who had sat before me in the cars from New York on that April day. As she turned in recognition of Mr. Lane's introduction, a faint flush seemed to show that she too recognized me, although I was unable to understand how she should know me, since she certainly had not turned her head once in the entire journey. I set it down to pure feminine intuition, not having wholly freed myself from that masculine superstition which regards woman's instinct as a sort of supernatural clairvoyance. My sensations on discovering her identity were not wholly unlike those of a man who inadvertently touches a charged Leyden jar.