I looked over the room casually, while McKnight ordered the meal.  Then my attention was attracted to the table next to ours.  Two people were sitting there, so deep in conversation that they did not notice us.  The woman’s face was hidden under her hat, as she traced the pattern of the cloth mechanically with her fork.  But the man’s features stood out clear in the light of the candles on the table.  It was Bronson!

“He shows the strain, doesn’t he?” McKnight said, holding up the wine list as if he read from it.  “Who’s the woman?”

“Search me,” I replied, in the same way.

When the chicken came, I still found myself gazing now and then at the abstracted couple near me.  Evidently the subject of conversation was unpleasant.  Bronson was eating little, the woman not at all.  Finally he got up, pushed his chair back noisily, thrust a bill at the waiter and stalked out.

The woman sat still for a moment; then, with an apparent resolution to make the best of it, she began slowly to eat the meal before her.

But the quarrel had taken away her appetite, for the mixture in our chafing-dish was hardly ready to serve before she pushed her chair back a little and looked around the room.

I caught my first glimpse of her face then, and I confess it startled me.  It was the tall, stately woman of the Ontario, the woman I had last seen cowering beside the road, rolling pebbles in her hand, blood streaming from a cut over her eye.  I could see the scar now, a little affair, about an inch long, gleaming red through its layers of powder.

And then, quite unexpectedly, she turned and looked directly at me.  After a minute’s uncertainty, she bowed, letting her eyes rest on mine with a calmly insolent stare.  She glanced at McKnight for a moment, then back to me.  When she looked away again I breathed easier.

“Who is it?” asked McKnight under his breath.

“Ontario.”  I formed it with my lips rather than said it.  McKnight’s eyebrows went up and he looked with increased interest at the black-gowned figure.

I ate little after that.  The situation was rather bad for me, I began to see.  Here was a woman who could, if she wished, and had any motive for so doing, put me in jail under a capital charge.  A word from her to the police, and polite surveillance would become active interference.

Then, too, she could say that she had seen me, just after the wreck, with a young woman from the murdered man’s car, and thus probably bring Alison West into the case.

It is not surprising, then, that I ate little.  The woman across seemed in no hurry to go.  She loitered over a demi-tasse, and that finished, sat with her elbow on the table, her chin in her hand, looking darkly at the changing groups in the room.

The fun at the table where the college boys sat began to grow a little noisy; the fat man, now a purplish shade, ambled away behind his slim companion; the newspaper woman pinned on her business-like hat and stalked out.  Still the woman at the next table waited.