“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, startled. “No!” “Then I’m sorry. That would have been a better reason for following me than--than the only one there is,” she swept on stormily. “You knew I didn’t wish to see any one at present. I said so in the note I left. Yet you spied on me and you tracked me deliberately, when I had trusted you with my address. It’s outrageous of you. You ought to be ashamed of doing it, Mr. Bayne.” A stunned realization burst on me of the line that she was taking, the position into which, willy-nilly, she was crowding me. I had trailed her here, she assumed, to thrust my company on her; and, upon the surface, I had to own that my behavior really had that air. If I had followed her with equal brazenness along Fifth Avenue, I should have had a chance to explain my conduct to the first police officer who noticed it, later to an indignant magistrate. But, heavens and earth! She knew why I had come. And knowing, how did she dare defy me? I retained just sufficient presence of mind to stare back impassively and to mumble with feeble sarcasm: “I’m very sorry you think so.” She came down a step. “Are you?” she asked imperiously. “Then--will you prove it? Will you go back to Paris by to-night’s train?” I had recovered myself. “There isn’t any train to-night,” I protested, civil, but adamant. “And--I’m sorry, but if there was I wouldn’t take it--not until I’ve accomplished what I came to do!” The girl seemed to concentrate all the world’s disdain in the look that measured me, running from my head to my unoffending feet, from my feet back to my head. “Most men would go, Mr. Bayne,” she flung at me, her red lips scornful. “But then, most men wouldn’t have come, of course. And all you will accomplish is to make me dine up here in this--this wretched, stuffy room.” Before I could lift a hand in protest, she had turned, mounted the stairs again, and vanished. The door--shall I own it?--slammed. CHAPTER XIV THE PLOT THICKENS Presently, summoned by the hostess, I went to my lonely meal in a mood that nobody on earth had cause to envy me. One thing was certain: Should it ever be disclosed that Miss Esme Falconer was not a spy, I should lack courage to go on living. Remembering the coolly brazen line I had taken and the assumptions she had drawn from it, I could think of no desert wide enough to hide my confusion, no pit sufficiently deep to shelter my utterly crestfallen head. In any case, I had not managed my attack at all triumphantly. From the first skirmish the adversary had retired with all the honors on her side. Carrying the matter with a high hand, she had dazed me into brief inaction, and then, as I gave signs of rally, had retreated in what to say the least was a highly strategic way. Well, let her go for the moment! She could scarcely escape me. I would see the thing through, I told myself with growing stubbornness; but I didn’t feel that the doing of a civic duty was what it is cracked up to be. Not at all!