“Why, I don’t remember, I’m sure.”
“Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It just occurred to me that I had cheated you out of your chair, and your money, too.”
“That’s mighty kind of you,” he said.
He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful to him for having the tact not to be flamboyant about it and not insisting on forgetting it.
“I’ll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if you will feel easier about it, I’ll ask you for it.”
“I could hardly rob a perfect stranger,” she began.
He broke in: “They say nobody is perfect, and I’m not a perfect stranger. I’ve met you before, Miss Webling.”
“Not rilly! Wherever was it? I’m so stupid not to remember––even your name.”
He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could understand her haziness the better from the fact that when he first saw her in the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was because he had identified her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long gone––the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his distance. But the proffer of the money for the chair-car chair broke the ice a little. He said at last: