He opened the door of the sitting-room deliberately, and walked in with a certain formal precision.  But the figure of a woman arose from the sofa, and with a slight outcry, half playful, half hysterical, threw herself upon his breast with the single exclamation, “Jim!” He started back from the double shock.  For the woman was not his wife!  A woman extravagantly dressed, still young, but bearing, even through her artificially heightened color, a face worn with excitement, excess, and premature age.  Yet a face that as he disengaged himself from her arms grew upon him with a terrible recognition, a face that he had once thought pretty, inexperienced, and innocent,—­the face of the widow of his former partner, Cutler, the woman he was to have married on the day he fled.  The bitter revulsion of feeling and astonishment was evidently visible in his face, for she, too, drew back for a moment as they separated.  But she had evidently been prepared, if not pathetically inured to such experiences.  She dropped into a chair again with a dry laugh, and a hard metallic voice, as she said,—­

“Well, it’s you, anyway—­and you can’t get out of it.”

As he still stared at her, in her inconsistent finery, draggled and wet by the storm, at her limp ribbons and ostentatious jewelry, she continued, in the same hard voice,—­

“I thought I spotted you once or twice before; but you took no notice of me, and I reckoned I was mistaken.  But this afternoon at the Temple of Music”—­

“Where?” said James Smith harshly.

“At the Temple—­the San Francisco Troupe performance—­where you brushed by me, and I heard your voice saying, ‘Beg pardon!’ I says, ’That’s Jim Farendell.’”

“Farendell!” burst out James Smith, half in simulated astonishment, half in real alarm.

“Well!  Smith, then, if you like better,” said the woman impatiently; “though it’s about the sickest and most played-out dodge of a name you could have pitched upon.  James Smith, Don Diego Smith!” she repeated, with a hysteric laugh.  “Why, it beats the nigger minstrels all hollow!  Well, when I saw you there, I said, ’That’s Jim Farendell, or his twin brother;’ I didn’t say ‘his ghost,’ mind you; for, from the beginning, even before I knew it all, I never took any stock in that fool yarn about your burnt bones being found in your office.”

“Knew all, knew what?” demanded the man, with a bravado which he nevertheless felt was hopeless.

She rose, crossed the room, and, standing before him, placed one hand upon her hip as she looked at him with half-pitying effrontery.