I fell to eating savagely. He had called me by my right name! Ah, yes; Louis was right. That was his master’s suspicion, was it? But now I was fully warned. He should not catch me napping. I paid no attention to his remark and went on eating. This behavior seemed to reassure the patroon. When I next looked up he wore a more satisfied expression. His elbows were on the edge of the table and his eyes fixed on the tips of his fingers, which were tapping each other softly. “Now you are done eating,” he said at last, “let us hear her story. Miriam, tell us of your visit.” I then learned that, for some reason unknown to herself, Mistress Van Volkenberg had been sent by her father to Lady Marmaduke’s, in New York. Her errand was to inquire my whereabouts. She was told at the hall that I was dead and that my body lay in the small room upstairs, which had been mine. “Ay, but was he dead?” interrupted her father. “Did you see him, Miriam?” “Yes,” she answered. “I saw him. Oh!” She shuddered and turned to leave the room. Mistress Van Volkenberg, then almost unknown to me, was a woman who could not pass unnoticed in any place. She was tall and slender, with a high forehead and piercing brown eyes like her father’s. What most characterized her, however, was the color in her cheeks. I have seen her since in sickness and in health, and always there was the same color of blooming red, which was the more welcome for the beauty it gave her face. She was flushed, perhaps overflushed, when she left the room, and both the patroon and I noticed it. “Poor child,” he said softly with a yearning look in his eyes. “She has had too much excitement. I should not have sent her.” Van Volkenberg had little to say for a while. He was wholly taken up with the news his daughter had brought. Often he would be in a brown study for minutes at a time. I said nothing to rouse him, for I was bound that he should lead our conversation till I should be less in the dark as to what he knew about me. At last he seemed to notice how evident his moody conduct was. “This man Le Bourse,” he said, at the same time bending his bright eyes upon my face as if he would read me through and through, “this man, Le Bourse, was a man I wished to see. Alas the while! I wish he were yet alive.” “A friend of yours?” I asked, mustering my voice as well as I could. I knew instinctively that I was under examination. “No, hardly a friend; and yet I owed him some reparation for an injury. I wish he were here.” “There is no fetching dead men back to life,” I said. And then I added: “At least in the flesh.” “He will not haunt me, if that is what you mean.” The patroon walked thoughtfully across the room, and stood for some time with his back towards me, looking out of the window across the broad terrace where I had seen Ronald Guy and the execution the night before. I could see his figure relax and droop a little.