called your daffodil 'The Good Comrade?'"

"The daffodil!" she repeated in frank amazement; she was completely
surprised, and for once she did not attempt to hide it.

"Yes," Rawson-Clew said; "why did you call it 'The Good Comrade?'"

Julia began to recover herself and also her natural caution. This was
not the question she expected, but the rogue in her made her wary even
of the seemingly simple and safe. "I called it after three friends,"
she said, "who were good comrades to me--you, Johnny and Joost Van
Heigen. Why do you ask?"

"Because I wondered if it was a case of telepathy; I also named
something 'The Good Comrade.'"

"You?" she said. "What did you name? Was it a dog?"

"No, a bottle--small, wide-necked, stopper fastened with a piece of
torn handkerchief, about two-thirds full of a white powder!"

Julia had begun washing the cups; she did her best to betray no sign,
and really she did it very well; her eyelids flickered a little and
her breath came rather quickly, nothing more.

"Why did you name it?" she asked. "It is rather odd to do so, isn't
it?"

"I named it after the person who gave it to me."

Julia's breath came a little quicker; she forgot to remark that the
same reason had helped her in naming her flower; she was busy asking
herself if he meant her by the good comrade.

"Perhaps I did not exactly name my bottle," he went on to say, "but it
stood for the person to me. It was a sort of physical manifestation--rather
a grotesque one, perhaps--of a spiritual presence which had not really left
me since a certain sunny morning last year."

"That is very interesting," Julia managed to say; her native caution
had not misled her; the innocently beginning talk had taken a devious
way to the expected end.

"It was interesting," Rawson-Clew said, "but not quite satisfying, at
least not to the natural man. He is not content with a manifestation
any more than with a spiritual presence; he wants a corporal fact."

Julia looked up; the talk was taking an unforseen turn that she did
not quite follow, so she looked up. And then she read something in his
face that set her heart beating, that made her afraid, less perhaps of
him than of herself, and the thrill that ran like fire through her
body.

"I don't quite understand," she said, and dropped a cup.

It was meant to fall on the flagged floor and break; it would create a
diversion, and picking up the pieces would give her time to get used
to the su