Her perfectly baseless conviction that time would yet bring about my meeting with Mary, partly irritated, partly amused me.
"You seem to agree with Dame Dermody," I said. "You believe that our two destinies are one. No matter what time may elapse, or what may happen in the time, you believe my marriage with Mary is still a marriage delayed, and nothing more?"
"I firmly believe it."
"Without knowing why--except that you dislike the idea of my marrying Mrs. Van Brandt?"
She knew that this view of her motive was not far from being the right one--and, womanlike, she shifted the discussion to new ground.
"Why do you call her Mrs. Van Brandt?" she asked. "Mrs. Van Brandt is the namesake of your first love. If you are so fond of her, why don't you call her Mary?"
I was ashamed to give the true reason--it seemed so utterly unworthy of a man of any sense or spirit. Noticing my hesitation, she insisted on my answering her; she forced me to make my humiliating confession.
"The man who has parted us," I said, "called her Mary. I hate him with such a jealous hatred that he has even disgusted me with the name! It lost all its charm for me when it passed his lips."
I had anticipated that she would laugh at me. No! She suddenly raised her head as if she were looking at me intently in the dark.
"How fond you must be of that woman!" she said. "Do you dream of her now?"
"I never dream of her now."
"Do you expect to see the apparition of her again?"
"It may be so--if a time comes when she is in sore need of help, and when she has no friend to look to but me."
"Did you ever see the apparition of your little Mary?"
"Never!"
"But you used once to see her--as Dame Dermody predicted--in dreams?"
"Yes--when I was a lad."
"And, in the after-time, it was not Mary, but Mrs. Van Brandt who came to you in dreams--who appeared to you in the spirit, when she was far away from you in the body? Poor old Dame Dermody. She little thought, in her life-time, that her prediction would be fullfilled by the wrong woman!"
To that result her inquiries had inscrutably conducted her! If she had only pressed them a little further--if she had not unconsciously led me astray again by the very next question that fell from her lips--she must have communicated to my mind the idea obscurely germinating in hers--the idea of a possible identity between the Mary of my first love and Mrs. Van Brandt!