"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through everything. At last, I felt that I just _must_ know, at whatever cost. One day when we were driving, I brought him here and--and introduced him to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it--but I did it!" Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?" "Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you? Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?" "Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that." "That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?" "I? How should I know?" "I didn't know but she had told you," was the demure rejoinder. "It was Charlotte Farnham." "What!" ejaculated Raymer. But he was not more deeply moved than was the man behind the window curtains. If Broffin's dead cigar had not been already reduced to shapeless inutility, Miss Grierson's cool announcement, carrying with it the assurance that his secret was no secret, would have settled it. "It's so," she was adding calmly. "I found out. She and her aunt were passengers on the _Belle Julie_; that was the boat the robber escaped on, you remember. Doctor Bertie told me that. And she was the young woman who was having the draft cashed in the Bayou State Security. How do I know? Because her father bought the draft at poppa's bank, and in the course of time it came back with the Bayou State Security's dated paying stamp on it. See how easy it was!" Raymer's laugh was not altogether mirthful. "You are a witch," he said. "Is there anything that you don't know?" "Not so very many things that I really need to know," was the mildly boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr. Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man; and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. Griswold pretty nearly every day." Raymer nodded. Though he would not have admitted it under torture, the entire matter figured somewhat as a mountain constructed out of a rather small mole-hill to a man for whom the subtleties lay in a region unexplored. He wondered that the clear-minded little "social climber," as his sister called her, had ever bothered her nimble brain about such an abstruse and far-fetched question of identities.