To this question there seemed no sufficient answer, and for awhile he sat there fretting with the futile anxiety of a man who knows that his fate pursues him, who hopes that this turning or that may help him to evade it, yet always feels the benumbing certainty that the path he has taken is the shortest road to that he would avoid. When at last--recognizing that his meditations were unprofitable--he rose and went down the stairs, it was supper-time. The woman was uncommunicative, but he could feel that her eyes were on him. The man--it occurred to Forbes that he had probably been drinking--was talkative. After the meal was over they went outside. Forbes, by way of supporting his pretence of being an artist, took out a pocket sketch-book and made notes of the values of the clouds and the outlines of the hills against the sky in a sort of artistic short-hand. The man Wilson sat down on a bench and began to talk. Between the exciting effects of the whiskey he had taken, the soothing influence of the cigar Forbes proffered him, and a natural talent for communicativeness, he presently went on to tell his own story. Forbes listened attentively. It seemed a part of the melodrama of the whole situation and was as unreal to him as the flaming miracle of the western skies or his own presence here. “So the upshot of it all was that we just skipped out. She ran away with me.” It was a curious story. As Forbes listened he became aware that it was one with which he had occasionally met in the newspapers, but never in real life before. It was, apparently, the story of a girl belonging to a family of wealth and possibly of high social traditions--naturally he did not know what importance to attach to Wilson’s boast that his wife belonged “to the top of the heap”--who had eloped with the man who drove her father’s carriage. The reasons for this revolt against the natural order of her life was obscure; there was, perhaps, too high a temper on her side and too strict a restraint on the part of her guardians. There was necessarily a total absence of knowledge of life; there was also the fact that the coachman was undoubtedly a fine creature to look at; there might have been a momentary yielding on the part of a naturally dramatic temperament to the impulse for the spectacular in her life.