Miss Montressor had been thinking intently on the subject in discussion during all her waking moments since she and Bryan Duval had parted on the preceding night. It had not kept her from sleeping; her nerves were in too good order and her constitution was too sound for her to be subjected to inconveniences of that sort by any abstract cause of emotion; but she had thought over it until she fell asleep, and it had recurred to her with her first consciousness on waking. She had endeavoured, in anticipation of Bryan Duval's possible line of interrogation, to recall everything that had been said during the conversation between herself and Mr. Foster on the terrace at Richmond, and, strangely as she considered it, she found this very difficult to do. If Miss Montressor had understood the laws of mental processes better, she would have known that this difficulty was of ordinary occurrence, and to be anticipated in her case. She was not in the habit of thinking about anything systematically, and a beginning in this direction is no easier than any other mental process directed with intention. So that Miss Montressor had got herself rather into a muddle between what had really been said by Mr. Foster and her general impression of the interview, when she found Bryan Duval in the small ante-room in which the residents at the hotel usually received their friends. Neither was insensible to the gravity and incongruity of the occasion. That two strangers, come to New York in the trifling and superficial character of actors, should be--to their own almost indubitable persuasion, and quite unsuspected by the public--able to supply the key of one of the most terrible mysteries of crime which had for a long time startled and disturbed society, was a circumstance full of oddity and interest that they appreciated to the full. Literally nothing could have influenced, impressed, surprised, or agitated Duval out of the instincts of the dramatist who combines, and the actor who reproduces, the situations supplied by human events. When this story should be complete in its reality, it would find its way to the pigeon-holes in which Bryan Duval's materials, the pabulum of his ever-active brain, were stored up, with the regularity, in order and in date, of a privately edited edition of the _Annual Register_. In due, not in undue time--Bryan Duval was never so wanting in taste and judgment as to incur the charge of indecent haste--this drama of real life would no doubt be put upon the stage, with charming accessories of scenery, decoration, and padding-out. Bryan Duval saw his way to it already, though as yet the knowledge of the murderer and his motive were wanting to the story.