“I will speak of what I do know,” she said. “No, there is no need. Look! Look!”
She pointed at the bed--at the man on the bed--fingers locked in those of a woman who looked so like herself.
“You see--yet you do not see! Men are blind! Men look into a mirror, and see only whiskers they forgot to shave the day before. Women look once and then remember! Look again!”
He looked, knowing well there was something to be understood, that stared him in the face. But for the life of him he could not determine question or answer.
“What is in your bosom?” she asked him.
He put his hand to his shirt.
“Draw it out!” she said, as a teacher drills a child.
He drew out the gold-hilted knife with the bronze blade, with which a man had meant to murder him. He let it lie on the palm of his hand and looked from it to her and back again. The hilt might have been a portrait of her modeled from the life.
“Here is another like it,” she said, stepping to the bedside. She drew back the woman's dress at the bosom and showed a knife exactly like that in King's hand. “One lay on her bosom and one on his when I found them!” she said. “Now, think again!”
He did think, of thirty thousand possibilities, and of one impossible idea that stood up prominent among them all and insisted on seeming the only likely one.