A picture shot into my brain with knifelike sharpness. I saw Nathaniel, in the box at Ranelagh, holding up a rosy, paper-thin slice of ham and pretending to read my father’s letter through it. I heard his voice, even: “Dated from Arundel in the Province of Maine,” he had said. Those were his first words; and they had been heard by Marie de Sabrevois, blue-eyed, golden-haired, perfumed, with “freckles like inside a lily,” standing beyond our box in her dress of pink brocade, beside the silent, sleepy-looking Mr. Leonard. Mr. Leonard had volunteered, later, that they had heard what Nathaniel had said, and so had Marie de Sabrevois; but she had denied any knowledge of such a place as Arundel.

“The name wasn’t Marie de Sabrevois, was it?” I asked.

Cap’s jaw dropped; he stared at me from round eyes. “That’s just what it was! Where’d you ever know that poison ivy?”

I contrived, somehow, to keep my face expressionless. “It’s a common name in Canada,” I said. “There’s a place of the same name not far from Isle aux Noix.”

Cap nodded. “It’s just as well you don’t know her. There wasn’t anything that hellcat wouldn’t do! She learnt it from the feller she lived with. He was her brother, she said. Brother hell! No sir! You’re well off not to know her! She don’t like Americans, and she don’t like Arundel people, and she don’t like Arnold.”

“Why not?”

Cap scratched his head thoughtfully. “Why not? Well, she don’t like Americans because she used to be one herself and then stopped being one. That’s one damned good reason. For another thing, we killed the feller she lived with. Leastways, it was Steven killed him, kind of by accident; but I say ‘we’ because if he hadn’t, I’d ’a’ done it on purpose!”

“That doesn’t account for her not liking Arnold.”

“No,” Cap agreed. “Well, she don’t like Arnold because Arnold’s a friend of Stevie’s for one thing, and because Arnold went up to Montreal, years ago, and dragged her out of a convent to see if she was the same one that used to live in Arundel, and by God, she was!”

Cap’s voice rumbled on, telling Doc about Phoebe Nason; but I, possessed at last of definite knowledge of the things I hitherto had merely suspected, went to my bunk and sat upon it, wondering what to do.