And his mother-in-law! The mother of his wife!

Her name was Marie. In that chaos of flesh an interested eye might

discover the ruins of beauty. Her hair, he knew, had been black. He

recalled the terror expressed in every line of that mountainous

figure--which may well have been perfect twenty years ago. The green

pallor of her cheek! And he had long felt, rather than knew, that she

possessed magnificent powers of bluff. Her dignified exit had been no

more convincing to him than to Bisbee.

He went back over the past and recalled all he knew of the woman whose

daughter he had married. She had visited the United States about

twenty-one years ago, met and married Delano, and remained in San

Francisco two or three months on their way to Japan. Delano had died on

the voyage across the Pacific, been buried at sea, and his widow had

returned to her family in Rouen and settled down in her brother's

household.

This was practically all he knew, for it was all that Helene knew, and

Madame Delano never wasted words. It had not occurred to him to question

her. Their status in Rouen was established, and if not distinguished it

was indubitably respectable and not remotely suggestive of mystery.

Price, convinced that Helene's father must have been a gentleman,

recalled that he had asked her one day to tell him something of the

Delanos, but his wife had replied vaguely that she believed her

mother had been too sad to talk about him for a long while, and then

probably had got out of the habit. She knew nothing more than she

already had told him.

It came back to him, however, that several times his wife's casual

references to the past, and particularly regarding her parents, had not

dove-tailed, but that he had dismissed the impression; attributing it to

some lapse in his own attention. He had a bad habit of listening and

thinking out a knotty business problem at the same time. And there is a

curious inhibition in loyal minds which forbids them to put two and two

together until suspicion is inescapably aroused.

He had a very well ordered mind, furnished with innumerable little pigeon

holes, which flew open at the proper vibration from his admirable memory.

He concentrated this memory upon a little bureau of purely personal

receptacles and before long certain careless phrases of his wife stood in

a neat row.

She had mentioned upon one occasion that she thought she must have been

about five when she arrived in Rouen, and remembered her first impression

of the Cathedral as well as the boats on the Seine at night. And Cousin

Pierre had taken her up the river one Sunday to the church on the height

which had been built for a statue of the Virgin that had been excavated

there, and bade her kneel and pray at this station for what she wished

most. She had prayed for a large wax doll that said papa and mama, and

behold, it had arrived the next day.




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