"Perhaps you think I had Mary's personality transferred and that it exists side by side with my own here in this accidental shell. There are great scientists in Vienna." "Ah!" He looked at her sharply. "Button, button--I feel a sensation of warmth somewhere." She laughed again, but her eyes contracted and almost closed. "I fear you are a very romantic young man as well as a very curious one." "I deserved that. Well, I am curious. But not so curious as--interested." "I hope you are not falling in love with me." Her deep voice had risen to a higher register and was light and gay. "I am half in love with you. I don't know what is going to happen----" "And you want to protect yourself by disenchantment?" "Perhaps." "And you think it is my duty . . ." "Possibly I'd fall in love with you anyway, but I'd like to know where I stand. I have a constitutional hatred of mystery outside of fiction and the drama." "Ah." She gazed into the fire. "Mr. Dinwiddie, no doubt, is making investigations. If he verified my story, would you still disbelieve?" "I should know there was something back of it all." "You must have been a good reporter." "One of the best." "I suppose it is that." "Partly. I don't think that if you were not just what you are I'd care a hang. Other people's affairs don't excite me. I've outgrown mere inquisitiveness." "That is rather beside the point, isn't it? It all comes back to this--that you are afraid of falling in love with me." "You don't look as if it would do me any good if I did." "Why not let it go at that?" "I think the best thing I can do is to get out altogether." She rose swiftly and came close to him. "Oh, no! I am not going to let you go. You are the only person on this continent who interests me. I shall have your friendship. And you must admit that I have done nothing----" "Oh, no, you have done nothing. You've only to be." He wondered that he felt no desire to touch her. She looked lovely and appealing and very young. But she radiated power, and that chin could not melt. He asked abruptly: "How many men have you had in love with you?" "Oh!" She spread out her hands vaguely. "How can one remember?" And that look he most disliked, that look of ancient wisdom, disillusioned and contemptuous, came into her eyes. "You are too young to have had so very many. And the war took a good slice out of your life. I don't suppose you were infatuating smashed-up men or even doctors and surgeons." "Certainly not. But, when one marries young--and one begins to live early in Europe." "How often have you loved, yourself?" "That question I could answer specifically, but I shall not." He calculated rapidly. "Four years of war. Assuming that you are thirty-two, although sometimes you look older and sometimes younger, and that you married at seventeen, that would leave you--well, eleven years before the war began. I suppose you didn't fall in love once a year?"