knew she was behind me looking over my shoulder rather more stormily
than she usually does; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and
saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after awhile I was aware
of hearing her step on the stairs."

Alderling stopped, and smoked definitively, as if that were the end.

"Well," I said, after waiting a while, "I don't exactly get the unique
value of the incident."

"Oh," he said, as if he had accidentally forgotten the detail, "the steps
were coming up?"

"Yes?"

"She opened the door, which she had omitted to do before, and when she
came in she denied having been there already. She owned that she had been
hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so as to make me do
something, or undo something, to it; and then all at once she lost her
impatience, and came up at her leisure. I don't exactly like to tell what
she wanted."

He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tranquilly, "I don't mind
your telling Mr. Wanhope."

"Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, I will confide that
she had found some traces of a model that I used to paint my Madonnas
from, before we were married, in that picture. She had slept on her
suspicion, and then when she could not stand it any longer, she had come
up in the spirit to say that she was not going to be mixed up in a