One thing struck me during the evening. Watching her most narrowly, I could not see in her any under-current of feeling; she seemed to think what she said, and to say just what she thought; there were no musings, no reveries, no fits of abstraction, such as one would think would go always with sin or crime. Her attention was given always to what was passing; she was not in the least like a person with anything weighing on her mind. We were talking, Lance and I, of an old friend of ours, who had gone to Nice, and that led to a digression on the different watering places of England. Lance mentioned several, the climate of which he declared was unsurpassed--those mysterious places of which one reads in the papers, where violets grow in December, and the sun shines all the year round. I cannot remember who first named Brighton, but I do remember that she neither changed color nor shrank. "Now for a test," I said to myself. I looked at her straight in the face, so that no expression of hers could escape me--no shadow pass over her eyes unknown to me. "Do you know Brighton at all?" I asked her. I could see to the very depths of those limpid eyes. No shadow came; the beautiful, attentive face did not change in the least. She smiled as she replied: "I do not. I know Bournemouth and Eastbourne very well; I like Bournemouth best." We had hardly touched upon the subject, and she had glided from it, yet with such seeming unconsciousness. I laughed, yet, I felt that my lips were stiff and the sound of my voice strange. "Every one knows Brighton," I said. "It is not often one meets an English lady who does not know it." She looked at me with the most charming and frank directness. "I spent a few hours there once," she said. "From the little I saw of it I took it for a city of palaces." "It is a beautiful place," I said. She rose with languid grace and went to the table. "I think I will ring for some tea," she said. "I am chill and cold in spite of the fire. Mr. Ford, will you join me?" CHAPTER VII. My feelings when I reached my room that night were not to be envied. I was as firmly convinced of the identity of the woman as I was of the shining of the sun. There could not be any mistake; I had seen her face quite plainly in the moonlight, and it had been too deeply impressed on my mind for me to forget it, or to mistake it for another. Indeed, the horror of the discovery was still upon me; my nerves were trembling; my blood was cold. How could it be that my old friend Lance had made so terrible a mistake? How could I bear to know that the wife whom he worshiped was a murderess? What else she had been, I did not care even to think; whose child it was, or why she had drowned it, I could not, dare not think.