I was going to," he said in despair. "I couldn't keep it--I
couldn't stop it. And now that you see what sort of a man I am I'm going
to tell you more."

"You need not," she said faintly.

"I must. Listen! I--I don't even know your full name--all I know is that
it is Betty, and that your cat's name is Clarence and your plumber's name
is Quinn. But if I didn't know anything at all concerning you it would
have been the same. I suppose you will think me insane if I tell you that
before the car, on which you rode, came into sight I _knew_ you were on
it. And I--cared--for--you--before I ever saw you."

"I don't understand----"

"I know you don't. _I_ don't. All I understand is that what you and I
have done has been done by us before, sometime, somewhere--part only--
down to--down to where you changed cars. Up to that moment, before you
took the Lexington Avenue car, I recognized each incident as it
occurred.... But when all this happened to us before I must have lost
courage--for I did not recognize anything after that except that I cared
for you.... _Do_ you understand one single word of what I have been
saying?"

The burning color in her face had faded slowly while he was speaking; her
lifted eyes grew softer, serious, as he ended impetuously.

She looked at him in retrospective silence. There was no mistaking his
astonishing sincerity, his painfully earnest endeavor to impart to her
some rather unusual ideas in which he certainly believed. No man who
looked that way at a woman could mean impertinence; her own intelligence
satisfied her that he had not meant and could never mean offense to any
woman.

"Tell me," she said quietly, "just what you mean. It is not possible for
you to--care--for--me.... Is it?"

He disclosed to her, beginning briefly with his own name, material and
social circumstances, a pocket edition of his hitherto uneventful career,
the advent that morning of the emissary from The Green Mouse, his
discussion with Smith, the strange sensation which crept over him as he
emerged from the tunnel at Forty-second Street, his subsequent
altercation with Smith, and the events that ensued up to the eruption of
Clarence.

He spoke in his most careful attorney's manner, frank, concise,
convincing, free from any exaggeration of excitement or emotion. And she
listened, alternately fascinated and appalled as, step by step, his story
unfolded the links in an apparently inexorable sequence involving this
young