'I don't remember,' said Mary hastily, but without going down the ladder.
'I might never have met you,' Rob continued grimly, 'if some man in Silchester had not murdered his wife.'
Mary started and looked up at him. Until she ceased to look he could not go on.
'The murder,' he explained, 'was of more importance than Colonel Abinger's dinner, and so I was sent to the castle. It is rather curious to trace these things back a step. The woman enraged her husband into striking her, because she had not prepared his supper. Instead of doing that she had been gossiping with a neighbour, who would not have had time for gossip had she not been laid up with a sprained ankle. It came out in the evidence that this woman had hurt herself by slipping on a marble, so that I might never have seen you had not two boys, whom neither of us ever heard of, challenged each other to a game at marbles.'
'It was stranger that we should meet again in London,' Mary said.
'No,' Rob answered, 'the way we met was strange, but I was expecting you.'
Mary pondered how she should take this, and then pretended not to hear it.
'Was it not rather The Scorn of Scorns that made us know each other?' she asked.
'I knew you after I read it a second time,' he said; 'I have got that copy of it still.'
'You said you had the card.'