Mrs. Upcher kept her promise. She pulled herself together and came to dinner, in a high black dress without so much as a white ruche to relieve it. The manager of the ranch, a young Englishman named Floyd, dined with us. He was handsome in a bloodshot way, and a detrimental, if ever there has been one. In love with Mrs. Upcher he looked to be; that, too, in the same bloodshot way. But she clearly had him in perfect order. The mask, I suppose, had worked. Letitia did her social best, but her informing talk failed to produce any pleasant effect. It was too neat and flat. Floyd watched Mrs. Upcher, and she watched the opposite wall. I did my best to watch no one. We were rather like a fortuitous group at a provincial _table d’hôte_: dissatisfied with conditions and determined not to make acquaintance. We were all thankful, I should think, when the meal was over. Mrs. Upcher made no attempt to amuse us or make us comfortable. The young manager left for his own quarters immediately after dinner, and Letitia soon went to her room. I lingered for a moment, out of decency, thinking Rachel Upcher might want to speak to me, to ask me something, to cry out to me, to clutch me for some desperate end. She sat absolutely silent for five minutes; and, seeing that the spell, whatever it was, was not yet broken, I left her. I did not go to bed at once. How should I have done that? I was still listening for that scream, that pistol-shot. Nothing came. I remember that, after an hour, I found it all receding from me--the Upchers’ crossed emotions and perverted fates. It was like stepping out of a miasmic mist. Filippo Upcher was dead; and on the other side of the grave there had been no such encounter for him as I had imagined. And I had positively seen a demoniac Rachel Upcher waiting for him on that pale verge! I searched the room for books. There was some Ibsen, which at that moment I did not want. I rejected, one after one, nearly all the volumes that the shelves held. It was a stupid collection. I had about made up my mind to the “Idylls of the King” (they were different enough, in all conscience, from the Upcher case) when I saw a pile of magazines on a table in a distant corner. “Something sentimental,” I proposed to myself, as I went over to ravage them. Underneath the magazines--a scattered lot, for the most part, of _London Graphics_ and _English Illustrateds_--I found a serried pack of newspapers: San Francisco and Denver sheets, running a few months back. I had never seen a Denver newspaper, and I picked one up to read the editorials, out of a desultory curiosity rare with me. On the first page, black head-lines took a familiar contour. I had stumbled on the charwoman’s evidence against Filippo Upcher. _Rien que ça!_