“Did Mrs. Bogardus say anything when she first saw that man? Did you notice what she said?—how she took it?”
The hero, who was also a gentleman, looked at the doctor coolly.
“It was not a nice thing,” he said. “I saw just as little as I could.”
“You don't understand me,” said the doctor. “I want to know if Mrs. Bogardus appeared to you to have made any discovery—received any shock not to be accounted for by—by what you both saw?”
“I shouldn't attempt to answer such a question,” said the youngster bluntly. “I never saw Mrs. Bogardus in my life before to-day.”
The doctor colored. “Mrs. Bogardus has given me a telegram to send, and I don't know whether to send it or not. It's going to make a whole lot of talk. I am not much acquainted with Mrs. Bogardus myself, except by hearsay. That's partly what surprises me. It looks a little reckless to send out such a message as that, by the first hand that comes along. Hadn't we better give her time to think it over?” He opened the telegram for the other to read. “The man himself can't speak. But he just pants for breath every time she comes near him: he tries to hide his face. He acts like a criminal afraid of being caught.”
“He didn't look that way to me—what was left of him. Not in the least like a criminal.”
“Well, no; that's a fact, too. Now they've got him laid out clean and neat, he looks as if he might have been a very decent sort of man. But that, you know—that's incredible. If she knows him, why doesn't he know her? Why won't he own her? He's afraid of her. His eyes are ready to burst out of his head whenever she comes near him.”
“Did Mrs. Bogardus write that telegram herself?”
“She did.”