For an instant Echo's breath stopped. In the unexpected dénouement she had guessed, as at a lightning-flash, Craig's real purpose. Sharply, baldly introduced, the tale stood forth intrusive and malicious, an implied slur upon a man who was not present to refute it. Her whole being flooded with fierce resentment, mingled with an angry amaze that of all there no one else seemed to have caught the insinuation. To the rest it had been at most a _gaucherie_, a parallel which, if perhaps not felicitous, had been without significance and would be readily forgotten. Therein lay the added sting, that Craig had so accurately judged the outcome. He had guessed how it stood with her and Harry Sevier, and counting on her keener sensitiveness where the latter was concerned, had barbed his shaft for her alone! The next instant, however, the tension broke with every one talking at once. From this babble the senator emerged with a negro story about a trial with "exterminatin' circumstances," which brought a ripple of laughter, and presently the hostess gave the rising signal. The room opened upon the ball-room from whose further end already came the squeak of tuned catgut, and beyond this spread the invitingly cool verandas, now beginning to fill with filmy gowns that showed pallidly against the evening dusk, where the bouquet of masculine segars mingled with the dewed scent of shrubbery. Here in the increasing numbers, unobserved as she thought, Echo stepped down onto the cool dark turf and following one of the little meandering bush-bordered paths, came to a rustic bench over which a paper lantern threw flickering rose-coloured shadows. On this she sat down, struggling to regain her lost composure and grateful for the sense of quiet and the cool inspiration of the water, over whose margin the moonbeams danced in elfish ecstasy. In another moment, however, the silence was broken. A step sounded on the path, and she looked up to see Craig standing before her. CHAPTER IX THE TURN OF THE LONG LANE Echo came to her feet, all her blood on fire. In her resentment it had seemed to her that by very silence she had made herself party to that slur upon the man she loved, and she had been aching fiercely to repel it. Craig tossed his segar away. He made no apologies for having followed her from the piazza. "May I sit here and talk to you?" he asked. She remained standing. "Mr. Craig," she said with quiet emphasis, "I am glad you have come to me here. I have something to ask you which I could not have asked you--there." He bowed and stood waiting. "I fancied," she went on, "in certain of your remarks at the table a lurking innuendo. It is difficult to reply to such a thing. You would make it possible if you would put it in a more direct form." "Your own observation does not appear to err in directness," he answered, after a pause. "I am afraid I must ask you to descend to plain English." "In the course of the dinner you told a story."