It was a light and lofty room, with a broad bay-window overlooking the park; and in the bay a window-seat forming a coffer, which had been broken open from within; and just clear of the splinters, her hands raised to her disheveled hair, hat awry and country clothes begrimed, a young woman risen like Aphrodite from the foam. She had been gazing out as she put herself to rights; but at the opening of the door she turned with a light disdain, and the pair of them stood rooted to the floor. "Lady--Vera!" he could only gasp. She made him an abrupt little bow; then her head went back to the truculent angle necessitated by a jelly-bag hat worn almost as a mask; and her eyes hung under the brim like great blue rain-drops, grim and gleaming, but with little of his blank amazement, and nothing of the shame that shook his soul. "No wonder you would never see me!" he muttered more to himself than to her. "Not a word even when I wrote--and I wondered what I'd done! I thought of heaps of things--but I never thought of this!" She shook her head as abruptly as she had bowed; the blue rain-drops looked frozen where they hung, but the firm lips parted impulsively. Instinct prepared him for something inconceivable. But her self-restraint was a lesson and a reproof; and, in laying it to heart and listening to what she did say he for the moment ceased from wondering what it was that she had just kept back--what charge she had deferred against him. "Tell me one thing, Doctor Dollar." Her voice was all that it had been in other emergencies, only colder by some degrees. "Have you been following me, or is this pure chance?" "Not chance--pure Fate!" "Did you dog me down here, or did you not?" "Not consciously. Do I look as if I had?" "You look as if you'd seen a ghost," she told him, with a sudden twinkle of the big blue drops. "So I have!" he cried in passionate earnest. "I've seen the ghost of everything I held most----" "Thank you," she said quietly, when he had checked himself on her model. "I know what you must think--what you really have a special right to think--after two years ago. Do be generous and don't say it! This isn't altogether fun for me, you know, much less after being buried alive for hours!" She just turned her head toward the broken window-seat, and his eyes devoured the light upon her profile. "What's going to happen to me? Is my natural enemy a friend of yours? Has he sent for the police?" "No--for me instead." "Did he know who it was at sight?" "He didn't, and he doesn't, and he never shall unless you tell him!" exclaimed Dollar vehemently. "O Vera, when I was longing to see you, to warn you against your enemies, that you should go the way to put yourself more than ever in their power!"