“No; I never saw her.”
“Then how do you know it was Cynthia? See here; what are you holding from me? How do you know she’s dead at all?”
“The Germans told me. The Germans said that she was the girl who was killed in that wreck.”
“The Germans? What Germans? What do you mean?”
“A German—I don’t know who—but some German identified her from her passport and took the passport.”
“Why? How do you know that? How did you get into her affairs, anyway?”
“Because I was like her,” Ruth said. “I happened to be so very like her that——”
“That what?” He was standing over her now, shaking, controlling himself by intervals of effort; and Ruth faltered, huddling back a little farther from him and gazing up at him aghast. She had determined, a few minutes earlier, that there had become no alternative for her but to confess to him the entire truth; but the truth which she had to tell had become an incredible thing, as the truth—the exact truth of the circumstances which fix fates—has a way of becoming.
Desperately her mind groped for a way to arrange the events of that truth in a way to make him believe; but each moment of delay only made her task more impossible. He had roused from the suspicion, which had begun to inflame him when they were yet on the street, to a certainty that the girl whom he loved had been foully dealt by.
“That what?” he demanded again.