"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this time——"
Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when, under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the character of Fidelia in the book. Moreover, she would be his touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might, if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the deck-hand of the Belle Julie.
Thus the complacent, musing upper thought in the mind and on the lips of the proletary as he wended his way through the quiet and well-nigh deserted streets to the older part of the town. How much it might have been modified if he had known that the man whose face Miss Farnham had seen at the window was silently tracking him through the tree-shadowed streets is a matter for conjecture. Also, it is to be presumed that much, if not all, of the complacency would have vanished if he could have been an unseen listener in the Farnham sitting-room, dating from the time when little Miss Gilman pattered off to bed, leaving the father and daughter sitting together under the reading-lamp.
At first their talk was entirely of the window apparition; the daughter insisting upon its reality, and the father trying to push it over into the limbo of things imagined. Driven finally to give all the reasons for her belief in the realities, Charlotte related the incident of the afternoon.
"You may remember that I told you over the 'phone that I had a caller this afternoon," she began.
The doctor did remember it, and said so.
"You can imagine how frightened I was when I tell you that it was a man—a detective from New Orleans who has, or at least who says he has, been travelling thousands of miles to find me."
Doctor Bertie was tickling his bearded chin thoughtfully. "He should have come to me first," he said, frowning a little at the invasion of his home. "It was about that bank robbery, I suppose?"
"Yes; he thought I could tell him the man's real name. It seems that they have no identity clew to work upon. I knew at the time that 'Gavitt' was an assumed name; the man as good as told me so, you remember. This Mr. Broffin wouldn't believe that I couldn't tell him the real name, and along toward the last he grew quite angry and threatening. He insisted upon it that I knew the robber—that I had known him before the crime was committed; and he intimated pretty broadly that I am still in communication with him. Of course, it is all very absurd; but it is also very annoying to think that somebody is spying upon you all the time. I didn't want to speak of it before Mr. Griswold; but it was this detective who came twice to look in at our windows this evening."
By this time the good Doctor Bertie had become the indignant Doctor Bertie.