"Search me!" said my Husband, "I never saw her before." "You--never saw her--before!" I stammered. "Why--why you called her by name!--you----" "I knew her face," said my Husband. "I've seen her picture. In London it was. In Hal Ferry's studio. Fifteen years ago if it's a day. A huge charcoal sketch all swoops and smouches.--Just a girl holding up a small hand-mirror to her astonished face.--'_The woman with the broken tooth_' it was called." "Fifteen years ago?" I gasped. "'_The--the woman with the broken tooth_!' What a--what a name for a picture! "Yes, wasn't it?" said my Husband. "And you'd have thought somehow that the picture would be funny, wouldn't you? But it wasn't! It was the grimmest thing I ever saw in my life! Sketched just from memory too it must have been. No man would have had the cheek to ask a woman to pose for him like that,--to reduplicate just for fun I mean that particular expression of bewilderment which he had by such grim chance surprised on her unwitting face. Such shock! Such _astonishment_! It wasn't just the astonishment you understand of Marred Beauty worrying about a dentist. But a look the stark, staring, chain-lightning sort of look of a woman who, back of the broken tooth, linked up in some way with the accident of the broken tooth, saw something, suddenly, that God Himself couldn't repair! It was horrid, I tell you! It haunted you! Even if you started to hoot you ended by arguing! Arguing and--wondering! Ferry finally got so that he wouldn't show it to anybody. People quizzed him so." "Yes, but Ferry?" I questioned. "No," said my Husband. "It was only by the merest chance that I heard the name Ann Stoltor associated in any way with the picture. Hal Ferry never told anything. Not a word. But he never exhibited the picture, I noticed. It was a point of honor with him, I suppose. If one lives long enough, of course, one's pretty apt to catch every friend off guard at least once in his facial expression. But one doesn't exhibit one's deductions I suppose. One mustn't at least make professional presentation of them." "Yes, but Ann Woltor--Stoltor," I puzzled. "When she tried to bolt so? Was it because she knew that you knew Hal Ferry? When you called her Stoltor and dropped the lantern so funnily when you first saw her, was it then that she linked you up with this something--whatever it is that has hurt her so?--And determined even then to bolt at the very first chance she could get? But why in the world should she want to bolt?" I puzzled. "Certainly she's had to take us on faith quite as much as we've taken her. And I?--I _love_ her!" In the flare of the open doorway George Keets loomed quite abruptly. "Oh, is this where you bad people are?" he reproached us. "We've been searching the house for you." "Oh, of course, if you really need us," conceded my Husband. "But even you, I should think, would know a flirtation when you saw it and have tact enough not to butt in."