The two men stared at each other as if unwilling to accept the situation and yet unable to escape it. Each seemed waiting for the other to explain why he was there. It did not once occur to Reynolds that this man had the legal right to Agnes, and that henceforth she must be as lost as if dead. He went no further than to recognize that here was a mystery and a trouble. The catastrophe had been so peculiar and sudden, so lacking in those melodramatic features common to such scenes, that it had a dulling, numbing effect upon his faculties. Ransom was not so bewildered. It surprised him to see Reynolds and it displeased him as well, but he had prepared himself, before coming, for any kind of a scene with his wife; therefore, although excited, he was quite deliberate after the first little start of recognition had spent its force. "I was not expecting to see _you_," he said with peculiar emphasis. "Nor you me, I suppose." The man's whole manner was sinister and crafty, and yet, at the same time, there was something subdued, something suggestive of long suffering and unmerited injury, in the expression of his face and the attitude of his person. He appeared to Reynolds' startled and distorted vision an incarnate accusation. The situation might have had a touch of the supernatural in it, if its realism had not been so peculiarly pronounced and unmistakable. The whole affair was a cold, dull, immitigable affair. It did not even rise to the level of romance. It had come as death comes, a stark, overpowering, repulsive result of perfectly inexplicable causes, bearing down before it every thought of resistance or escape. Reynolds had ready no response. The predicament was one which seemed to him malign in its whole bearing, with no room for words of inquiry or of explanation. A sense of suffocation assailed him, as if all those dreams and hopes and delightful anticipations that he had been so luxuriating in lately, had fallen dead in a wilted heap upon his heart. Ransom was a strangely handsome man, with a dash of devil-may-care blended with melancholy in his face. His features were clearly and finely cut, delicate but not effeminate, showing strong traces of suffering, with something of that cool nervousness (if one may so express it) in their play, so often noticed in the faces of gamblers and outlaws. He was rather above the medium stature, well-knit and graceful, erect (saving that slight peculiar droop of one shoulder), alert and well-poised. He turned from Reynolds to Agnes and with the utmost tenderness said: "Come, little wife, I've a long story to tell you--a strange story. I have not been so bad as you think. I have been just the same as dead, four years in a Mexican prison."