means of ingenious circumlocutions, elicited the statement that
before she could cross the hall to the back passage she had heard
the gentlemen behind her, and had seen them go out of the front
door together.

"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell
me what he looked like."

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it
became clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had
been reached. The obligation of going to the front door to "show
in" a visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental
order of things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless
disarray, and she could only stammer out, after various panting
efforts at evocation, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you
might say--"

"Different? How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own
mind, in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it
that morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent
impressions.

"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a
youngish face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity
of interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate
answer to this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down
the rushing current of her own convictions. The stranger--the
stranger in the garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before?
She needed no one now to tell her that it was he who had called
for her husband and gone away with him. But who was he, and why