Brading did not reply; he was preoccupied with a new thought that was taking shape in his mind--what a scientist would have called an hypothesis; a detective, a theory. It might throw an added light, albeit a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion had not dispelled. The country was still new and, outside the villages, sparsely populated. The professional hunter was still a familiar figure, and among his trophies were heads and pelts of the larger kinds of game. Tales variously credible of nocturnal meetings with savage animals in lonely roads were sometimes current, passed through the customary stages of growth and decay, and were forgotten. A recent addition to these popular apocrypha, originating, apparently, by spontaneous generation in several households, was of a panther which had frightened some of their members by looking in at windows by night. The yarn had caused its little ripple of excitement--had even attained to the distinction of a place in the local newspaper; but Brading had given it no attention. Its likeness to the story to which he had just listened now impressed him as perhaps more than accidental. Was it not possible that the one story had suggested the other--that finding congenial conditions in a morbid mind and a fertile fancy, it had grown to the tragic tale that he had heard? Brading recalled certain circumstances of the girl's history and disposition of which, with love's incuriosity, he had hitherto been heedless--such as her solitary life with her father, at whose house no one apparently was an acceptable visitor, and her strange fear of the night by which those who knew her best accounted for her never being seen after dark. Surely in such a mind imagination once kindled might burn with a lawless flame, penetrating and enveloping the entire structure. That she was mad, though the conviction gave him the acutest pain, he could no longer doubt; she had only mistaken an effect of her mental disorder for its cause, bringing into imaginary relation with her own personality the vagaries of the local myth-makers. With some vague intention of testing his new "theory," and no very definite notion of how to set about it he said gravely, but with hesitation: "Irene, dear, tell me--I beg you will not take offense, but tell me--" "I have told you," she interrupted, speaking with a passionate earnestness that he had not known her to show, "I have already told you that we cannot marry; is anything else worth saying?"