And then within V. Vivian, M.D., there woke a cold doubt, and gnawed him. "Miss Heth--I must ask--for the whole moral question hangs on this ... _Did he know that you were upset_?" Miss Heth cleared her throat, preparatory to rising. She saw now that she ought never to have consented to talk with this strange man at all. Mamma would have known that in advance. "It is--rather absurd--for me to be asked to decide what _he_ knew. He has assured you that--" "But--I don't make myself clear, I see--the fact is that yours is the only assurance that will carry the smallest weight on that point.... He wasn't--may I ask?--actually _in_ the boat when it went over, was he?" "N-no. As to that--I believe he had just got out, but--" "Did you think at the time that he knew you were upset?" "Unfortunately, I am not a mind reader," she began with dignity, objecting seriously to these obstacles in the way of ending the interview. "Thrown without warning into the water, I could not look into his thoughts and see--" "Quite so. But did he show in any way that he knew you were upset?" A kind of chill had crept into the stranger's voice. The two young people gazed at each other. The man had strange eyes (they were the third thing she had noticed about him), gray, she thought, and gifted with an odd sort of translucence, singular and speaking. "Let me see. No, he did not. That is what I said at the time--that he didn't take the slightest notice of me--" "He swears he never dreamed anything was wrong till he landed. Don't you feel that that's quite possible, at least? Or.... did you scream out for his help, so loudly that he _must_ have heard you, if he'd been himself?" "The--the first few minutes in the water were very confusing. I can't pretend to say exactly what I did or didn't do. I had to think about saving my life--" "Of course. But if you'd screamed a number of times in saving your life, you would be likely to remember it, wouldn't you?" "Really I can't acknowledge your right to--" "Miss Heth--_why didn't you scream_?" His swift cross-examination touched the quick of her spirit; and she came to her feet, trembling a little, and feeling rather white. "I will not allow you to catechise me in this way. I will not...." Dr. Vivian, from the Dabney House, over the Gulf, stood still, quite silenced.... The thought had struck V. Vivian, and shot him down, that this girl was lying, deliberately suppressing the truth that meant more than life to Dal. She hadn't screamed. Dal hadn't known she was upset.... Yet was it thinkable? In the fiercest denouncing of the yellowest Huns, who had ever dreamed anything so base of them as this? _Lying?_ With that face like all the angels, that voice like a heavenly choir?...