"No, before. In the ball-room. You described him to me. You quoted his phrases. You had seen him that very morning. He was the stranger you quarrelled with in the streets of Plymouth."
"And you knew him from my description!" cried Charnock. All the anger had gone from his face, all the coldness from his voice. "I remember. Your face grew so white in the shadow of the alcove I should have believed you had swooned but for the living trouble in your eyes. Your face became through its pallor and distress the face which I had seen in my mirror. Oh, that mirror and its message!" He broke into a harsh bitter laugh, and seating himself at the table, beat upon his forehead with his clenched fists. "A message of appeal! A call for help! Was there ever such a fool in all the world? Here's one woman out of all the millions who needs my help, I was vain enough to think, and the first thing, the only thing that I did, was to tell her that her outcast bully of a husband was still alive to bully her. A fine way to help! But I guessed correctly even that night. Yes, even on that night I was afraid that I had revealed to you some misfortune of which you were unaware. Oh, why wasn't I struck dumb before I spoke? But you could not have been sure from my description," he cried eagerly, grasping in his remorse at so poor a straw as that subterfuge. "For men are not all unlike, and they use the same phrases. You could not have been certain. You must have had some other proof before you were convinced."
"Yes, that is true."
"And that other proof you got from someone else?" he said, and his voice implored her to assent.
Miranda only shook her head. "I promised to speak nothing but the truth. I got that other proof from you."
"No, no," he exclaimed. "Let me think! No, I told you nothing else but just my meeting with the man, my quarrel with him."
"Yes," said Miranda. "You told me how you woke up from dreaming of Ralph, and saw my face in your mirror. Don't you see? There is the convincing proof that the man you described to me, the man you quarrelled with, the man you dreamed of, was Ralph, for when you woke with that dream vivid in your mind, you saw my face vivid in your mirror. You yourself were at a loss to account for it, you had never so much as thought of me during the seven years since--since our eyes met at Monte Carlo. You could not imagine why on that particular night, after you had dreamed of someone else, unassociated with me, my face should have come back to you. But it was no mystery to me. The man you dreamed of was not unassociated with me; it was my husband, and the husband recalled to you the wife, by an unconscious trick of memory."
"But I did not know he was your husband," cried Charnock. "I had never seen him with you; I had never seen him at all before that day I quarrelled with him in the streets of Plymouth."
"You had," answered Miranda, gently. "He was with me that night at Monte Carlo seven years ago. We were on our honeymoon," she added, with a queer melancholy smile.
Charnock remembered the look of happiness upon her young face, and compared it with the tired woman's face which he saw now. "He was with you!" he exclaimed.