"Not such a very strong interest," he answered. "I am here merely to fill an idle hour, and because I happen to be occupying the flat in which your sister died. There is that link between her and me; she has moved in the same little home, looked from the same windows, slept in the same room, as I, poor girl." She suddenly looked up from the ground, saying: "May I ask how long you have been there?" "This is only the second day," he answered with a reassuring smile. "Your interest in her has been sudden." "But her crayon portrait is there over my dining-room mantelpiece, and it is an interesting one. The moment I saw you I understood that you are her sister." "You must have known that she had a sister." "Why, yes, I knew." "Who told you that, pray?" Her manner had now changed from one of alarm to one of resentment, of mistrust. Her questions leaped from her as from a judge eager to condemn. "Surely it was no secret that she had a sister," he said. "The agent happened to mention it in speaking to me of the late tenant, as agents do." "Ah, no doubt," she said half to herself. "You all are ready enough with explanations. Wise as serpents, if not harmless as doves." The last words were spoken with a break in her voice and a look that went to Harcourt's heart. He understood that he was in the presence here of the strange, of a mind touched to wildness by a monstrous grief, and needing delicate handling. "What I have told you is only the truth," he said gently. "Ah, no doubt," she said again. "But did you know the history of the flat before you went into it?" "Why, yes." "Yet you went. What, then, was your motive?" "Ah, now, come," said he. "I can see that you are on a wrong track, and I must try to set things right. Your sister has perhaps been badly treated by some one or more persons, and the notion has occurred to you that I may be one of them, or may have some knowledge even of one of them. But I have been in England only a month; I come from Wyoming, a place at the other end of creation. See if you can't catch a hint of an accent in my speech. I never saw your sister alive; I am quite a stranger in London. It is not nice to be mistrusted." She thought this over gravely, then said with a moment's openness of heart: "Forgive me, if I give you pain unjustly"; but at once again she changed, muttering stubbornly to herself with a certain vindictiveness: "If I mistrust you, it is not for nothing. I suppose you are all about equally pitiless and deadly. There she lies, low enough, dead, undone--so young--Gwen! was there no pity, no help, not even God to direct, not even God?"