At the end of the recital—and the colonel had not omitted a word or a look in his memory—she merely said: “Then you think Cary Mercer has kidnapped Archie, and the nice-looking Harvard boy is helping him?”

“Don’t you think it looks that way, yourself?”

She answered that question by another one: “But you don’t think, do you, that Janet is the Miss Smith mentioned?”

[111]His reply came after an almost imperceptible hesitation: “No!”

[111]

Again she smiled. “That is because you know Janet; if you didn’t know her you would think the chances were in favor of their meaning her? Naturally! Well, I know Cary a little. I knew his father well. I don’t believe he would harm a hair of Archie’s head. He isn’t a cruel fellow—at least not toward women and children. I’ve a notion that what he calls his wrongs have upset his wits a bit, and he might turn the screws on the Wall Street crowd that ruined him. That is, if he had a chance; but he is poor; he would need millions to get even a chance for a blow at them. But a child, a lad who looks like his brother—no, you may be sure he wouldn’t hurt Archie! He couldn’t.”

“But—the name, Winter; it is not such a common name; and the words about a lady of—of—” The polite soldier hesitated.

“An old woman, do you mean?” said Aunt Rebecca, with a little curving of her still unwrinkled upper lip.

“It sounds so complete,” submitted her nephew.

“Therefore distrust it,” she argued dryly. “Gaboriau’s great detective and Conan Doyle’s[112] both have that same maxim—not to pick out easy answers.”

[112]

Winter smiled in his own turn. “Still, sometimes the easy answers are right. Now, here is the situation: I hear this conversation at the depot. I find one of the men on the same train with me. He, presumably, if he is Cary Mercer, and I don’t think I can be mistaken in his identity—”

“Unless another man is making up as Cary!”

“It may seem conceited, but I don’t think I could be fooled. This man had every expression of the other’s, and I was too struck by the—I may almost call it malignant—look he had, not to recognize him. No, it was Mercer; he would certainly recognize you, and he would know who 

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