The name was not wholly new to me, as I had seen it signed to various magazine articles, concerning which at this moment I had only the most vague and general idea. I was sitting with my back to the door, and in rising I still kept my face half turned away from the lady who entered, but I saw the reflection of her face in a mirror opposite without any sense of recognition. As she advanced a step or two, however, and half passed me, I knew her. The delicate ear, the fine sweep of the neck, the knot of golden brown hair, were all familiar. It was the lady who had sat before me in the cars from New York on that April day.
As she turned in recognition of Mr. Lane’s introduction, a faint flush seemed to show that she too recognized me, although I was unable to understand how she should know me, since she certainly had not turned her head once in the entire journey. I set it down to pure feminine intuition, not having wholly freed myself from that masculine superstition which regards woman’s instinct as a sort of supernatural clairvoyance.
My sensations on discovering her identity were not wholly unlike those of a man who inadvertently touches a charged Leyden jar.
“Good heavens!” I exclaimed, “what a psychological conundrum, or whatever you choose to call it. The whole matter is as plain to me now as daylight.”
“Well?” Mr. Lane asked, while Miss Graham regarded me with an air which seemed to question whether my insanity were of a dangerous type.
“Pardon me, Miss Graham, if I cross-question you a little,” I went on, becoming somewhat excited. “You came from New York on the morning train on Wednesday, the fifteenth—no, the sixteenth of last April, did you not?”
“Yes,” she answered, her color again a trifle heightened, but her appearance being rather that of perplexity than of self-consciousness.
“And on the way you read Swinburne till you came to the line,
‘If you were April’s lady, and I were lord of May,’
and it occurred to you what a capital name for a story ‘April’s Lady’ would be?”