I shook my head. I was trying to believe that she was not quite sane, but it was impossible. Her mind, I could have sworn, was as vigorous as my own, though there was a difference, evidently. The precise, beautiful articulation of her English gave me a new direction. She must be a foreigner--Italian, for choice, in spite of her English eyes. "Marrying people is a business like any other, Miss--I did not hear your last name?" I ventured. "I have none," she said. "I mean," correcting herself, "Roger says that I must have one, of course, but I do not happen to have heard it," she added calmly. "Ah, well," I said coldly, "it is a mere detail." I was seriously vexed with Roger. This young woman passed belief. I decided that she was an actress of the first water and resented being imposed upon. "It is the same with my age--how old I am," she continued. "Roger thinks I am twenty years of age. Do you? He is going to ask you." "Really, I can't say," I returned shortly, "I am a poor judge of women's ages--or characters," I added pointedly. She did not blush nor move. Only her eyes widened slightly and darkened. "Roger will ask you," she repeated and I felt, unreasonably, as it seemed to me then, that my tone had hurt her, as one's tone, utterly incomprehensible as the words it utters may be, will hurt a child. She sat in silence for a moment, and I, curiously eager for her next remark and conscious suddenly of that strange, muffled excitement that had oppressed me a few hours before, watched her closely, gathering handfuls of sand and spilling them over my knee. "Did you ever go to Broadway?" she began again. "I have, yes." "I did, too," she assured me eagerly. "I think it is beautiful. I should like to live there, should not you? Perhaps," hopefully, "you do live there?" "No," I said, still on my guard and uncomfortable, "I don't. Are you planning to live there after you are married?" She shook her head regretfully. "I am afraid not," she said, and her voice dropped a full third and coloured with a most absurd and exquisite sombre quality, as Duse's used to in _La Dame aux Camellias_. "Roger would not want to. He will not want me to walk there very much, either. And that is very strange, because there is where I first saw him. But there are places I shall like quite as well, he says, and he will take me there. Will you come, too?" "I am afraid," I replied drily, "that I might be a little _de trop_, perhaps. Roger might not care for my society under those circumstances." Again she answered my tone rather than my words. "Roger loves you," she said simply. "He used to," I returned--inexcusably. Oh, yes! utterly inexcusably. Again her eyes widened and grew dark, and this time the corners of her mouth curved down pitifully, and I felt a strange heaviness at my heart.