Kent whistled, soft and long. “I’m afraid, my boy,” he said at length, “I’m very much afraid that you’ll have to tell me the whole story of the romance of the pictured face; and this time without reservation.”
“That’s what I’ve been guarding against,” retorted the other. “It isn’t a thing that I can tell, man to man. Don’t you understand? Or,” he added savagely, “do you misunderstand?”
“No, I don’t misunderstand,” answered Kent very gently. “I know there are things that can’t be spoken, not because they are shameful, but because they are sacred. Yet I’ve got to know about her. Here! I have it. When I’m gone, sit down and write it out for me, simply and fully, and send it to my hotel as soon as it is done. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can do that,” decided Sedgwick, after some consideration.
“Good! Then give me some dinner. And let’s forget this grisly thing for a time, and talk of the old days. Whatever became of Harkness, of our class, do you know?”
Between them that evening was no further mention of the strange body in Lonesome Cove.
[CHAPTER III—MY LADY OF MYSTERY]
Being a single autobiographical chapter from the life of Francis Sedgwick, with editorial comment by Professor Chester Kent.
Dear Kent: Here goes! I met her first on June 22, at three o’clock in the afternoon. Some wonderful cloud effects after a hard rain had brought me out into the open. I had pitched my easel in the hollow, on the Martindale Road, so as to get that clump of pine against the sky. There I sat working away with a will, when I heard the drumming of hoofs, and a horse with a girl in the saddle came whizzing round the turn almost upon me. Just there the rain had made a puddle of thick sticky mud, the mud-pie variety. As the horse went by at full gallop, a fine, fat, mud pie rose, soared through the air, and landed in the middle of my painting. I fairly yelped.
To get it all off was hopeless. However, I went at it, and was cursing over the job when I heard the hoofs coming back, and the rider pulled up close to me.