"I had to act very suddenly," I admitted. "If I hadn't spoken just exactly the minute I did she would have been off to Alaska within another forty-eight hours." "U-m-m," mused my Husband, and resumed his reading. But the half-inch of eye brow that puckered above the edge of his newspaper loomed definitely as the sample of a face that was still distinctly shocked. When he spoke again I was quite ready for his question. "How do you know that this Ann Woltor has got a past?" he demanded. "How do we know young Kennilworth's got a future?" I counter-checked. "Because he makes so much noise about it I suppose," admitted my Husband. "By which very same method," I grinned, "I deduct the fact that Ann Woltor has got a past,--inasmuch as she doesn't make the very slightest sound whatsoever concerning it." "You concede no personal reticence in the world?" quizzed my Husband. "Yes, quite a good deal," I admitted. "But most of it I honestly believe is due to sore throat. A normal throat keeps itself pretty much lubricated I've noticed by talking about itself." "Herself," corrected my Husband. "Himself," I compromised. "But this Ann Woltor has told you that she came from New Zealand," scored my Husband. "Oh, no, she hasn't!" I contradicted. "It was the hair-dresser who suggested New Zealand. All Ann Woltor has ever told me was that she was going to Alaska! Anybody's willing to tell you where he's going! But the person who never tells you where he's been--! The person who never by word, deed or act correlates to-day with yesterday! The Here with the There--! I've been home with her twice to her room! I've watched her unpack the Alaska trunk! Not a thing in it older than this winter! Not a shoe nor a hat nor a glove that confides anything! No scent of fir-balsam left over from a summer vacation! No photograph of sister or brother! Yet it's rather an interesting little room, too,--awfully small and shabby after the somewhat plushy splendor of the hairdressing job--but three or four really erudite English Reviews on the table, a sprig of blue larkspur thrust rather negligently into a water glass, and a man's----" "Blue larkspur in January?" demanded my Husband. "How--how old is this--this Woltor person?" "Oh--twenty-five, perhaps," I shrugged. With a gesture of impatience my Husband threw down his paper and began to poke the fire. "Oh, Pshaw!" he said, "is our whole dramatic endeavor going to be wrecked by the monotony of everybody being 'twenty-five'?" "Well--call it 'thirty-five' if you'd rather," I conceded. "Or a hundred and five! Arm Woltor wouldn't care! That's the remarkable thing about her face," I hastened with some fervor to explain. "There's no dating on it! This calamity that has happened to her,--whatever it is, has wrung her face perfectly dry of all contributive biography except the mere structural fact of at least reasonably conservative birth and breeding." A little bit abruptly my Husband dropped the fire-tongs.