"Good morning, Eaton," the blind man greeted him.
"Good morning, Mr. Santoine," Eaton answered; he understood by now that Santoine never began a conversation until the one he was going to address himself to had spoken, and that Santoine was able to tell, by the sound of the voice, almost as much of what was going on in the mind of one he talked with as a man with eyes is able to tell by studying the face. He continued to wait quietly, therefore, glancing up once to Harriet Santoine, whose eyes for an instant met his; then both regarded again the face of the blind man on the bed.
Santoine was lying quietly upon his back, his head raised on the pillows, his arms above the bed-covers, his finger-tips touching with the fingers spread.
"You recall, of course, Eaton, our conversation on the train," Santoine said evenly.
"Yes."
"And so you remember that I gave you at that time four possible reasons—as the only possible ones—why you had taken the train I was on. I said you must have taken it to attack me, or to protect me from attack; to learn something from me, or to inform me of something; and I eliminated as incompatible with the facts, the second of these—I said you could not have taken it to protect me."
"Yes."
"Very well; the reason I have sent for you now is that, having eliminated to-day still another of those possibilities,—leaving only two,—I want to call your attention in a certain order to some of the details of what happened on the train."
"You say that to-day you have eliminated another of the possibilities?" Eaton asked uneasily.
"To-day, yes; of course. You had rather a close call this morning, did you not?"