What did she say at that painful meeting in the woods--to the man?"
Mrs. Detlor looked at him as if she would read him through and through.
Presently she drew a ring from her finger slowly and gave it to him,
smiling bitterly.
"Read inside. That is what she said."
By the burning end of his cigar he read, "You told a lie."
At another hotel a man sat in a window looking out on the esplanade. He
spoke aloud.
"'You told a lie,' was all she said, and as God's in heaven I've never
forgotten I was a liar from that day to this."
CHAPTER II.
THE MEETING.
The next morning George Hagar was early at the pump-room. He found it
amusing to watch the crowds coming and going--earnest invalids and that
most numerous body of middle aged, middle class people who have no
particular reason for drinking the waters, and whose only regimen is
getting even with their appetites. He could pick out every order at a
glance--he did not need to wait until he saw the tumblers at their lips.
Now and then a dashing girl came gliding in, and, though the draft was
noxious to her, drank the stuff off with a neutral look and well bred
indifference to the distress about her. Or in strode the private
secretary of some distinguished being in London, S.
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