“Well, it's YOU, anyway—and you can't get out of it.”
As he still stared at her, in her inconsistent finery, draggled and wet by the storm, at her limp ribbons and ostentatious jewelry, she continued, in the same hard voice,—
“I thought I spotted you once or twice before; but you took no notice of me, and I reckoned I was mistaken. But this afternoon at the Temple of Music”—
“Where?” said James Smith harshly.
“At the Temple—the San Francisco Troupe performance—where you brushed by me, and I heard your voice saying, 'Beg pardon!' I says, 'That's Jim Farendell.'”
“Farendell!” burst out James Smith, half in simulated astonishment, half in real alarm.
“Well! Smith, then, if you like better,” said the woman impatiently; “though it's about the sickest and most played-out dodge of a name you could have pitched upon. James Smith, Don Diego Smith!” she repeated, with a hysteric laugh. “Why, it beats the nigger minstrels all hollow! Well, when I saw you there, I said, 'That's Jim Farendell, or his twin brother;' I didn't say 'his ghost,' mind you; for, from the beginning, even before I knew it all, I never took any stock in that fool yarn about your burnt bones being found in your office.”
“Knew all, knew what?” demanded the man, with a bravado which he nevertheless felt was hopeless.
She rose, crossed the room, and, standing before him, placed one hand upon her hip as she looked at him with half-pitying effrontery.
“Look here, Jim,” she began slowly, “do you know what you're doing? Well, you're making me tired!” In spite of himself, a half-superstitious thrill went through him as her words and attitude recalled the dead Scranton. “Do you suppose that I don't know that you ran away the night of the fire? Do you suppose that I don't know that you were next to ruined that night, and that you took that opportunity of skedaddling out of the country with all the money you had left, and leaving folks to imagine you were burnt up with the books you had falsified and the accounts you had doctored! It was a mean thing for you to do to me, Jim, for I loved you then, and would have been fool enough to run off with you if you'd told me all, and not left me to find out that you had lost MY money—every cent Cutler had left me in the business—with the rest.”