"If you really care to have it."
"Very much," he urged.
Again she turned as though escaping something and wrote:
"I seemed to be walking through a forest with Vail. I don't know where we were going, but I seemed to have difficulty in getting there. Vail was helping me along. It was up-hill. Finally, when we got almost to the top of the hill, I stopped. I did not go any farther, though he did."
Here again she hesitated, then wrote slowly, "Then I seemed to meet—" and stopped.
Honora glanced up, saw Kennedy watching her, and turned hurriedly, adding, "—a woman."
She did not pause after that, but wrote: "Just then she cried that there was a fire. I turned around and looked. There was a big explosion and everybody ran out of the houses, shrieking."
"You say you saw a woman?" asked Craig, almost before she had finished writing. "Who was she?"
"I do not know who she was—a—just a woman."
By this time I, too, was narrowly watching Mrs. Wilford. She seemed to have a most remarkable composure, except for an almost imperceptible moment of hesitation now and then. In fact, the hesitation would have passed unnoticed had not one been on the lookout. I think it was now that she realized that there was something going on in Kennedy's mind and in his method of questioning her that she did not understand. It was as though in taking refuge from answering one question—about the faces on the bull and the serpent—she had run directly into another question which she was equally averse to answering frankly. I was now convinced that a large part of her frankness with us was mere pose, that she knew Kennedy had penetrated it, and that the discovery alarmed her. Kennedy also saw that she had understood. It was as though it had been a cue. Instantly he threw off the mask.