..." and the date was
gone. That was all. There was no name, no word that might give him a
clue as to the identity of the mysterious woman in the coach, or her
relationship to the strange picture she had left in her seat when she
disappeared at Graham.
Once more his puzzled eyes tried to find some solution to the mystery of
this night in the picture of the girl herself, and as he looked,
question after question pounded through his head. What had startled her?
Who had frightened her? What had brought that hunted look--that
half-defiance--into her poise and eyes, just as he had seen the strange
questing and suppressed fear in the eyes and face of the woman in the
coach? He made no effort to answer, but accepted the visual facts as
they came to him. She was young, the girl in the picture; almost a child
as he regarded childhood. Perhaps seventeen, or a month or two older; he
was curiously precise in adding that month or two. Something in the
_woman_ of her as she stood on the rock made it occur to him as
necessary. He saw, now, that she had been wading in the pool, for she
had dropped a stocking on the white sand, and near it lay an object
that was a shoe or a moccasin, he could not make out which. It was
while she had been wading--alone--that the interruption had come; she
had turned; she had sprung to the flat rock, her hands a little
clenched, her eyes flashing, her breast panting under the smother of her
hair; and it was in this moment, as she stood ready to fight--or
fly--that the camera had caught her.
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