"You think it is strange that I should know Miss Farnham's name and address without having met her?" Griswold asked, when the pause had become a keen agony.
Miss Grierson's rejoinder was flippant. "Oh, no; she is pretty enough to account for a stranger thing than that."
"She is more than pretty," said Griswold, impulsively; "she has the beauty of those who have high ideals, and live up to them."
"I thought you said you didn't know her," was the swift retort.
"I said I hadn't met her, and that she doesn't know me."
"Oh," said the small fitter of deduction pegs; and afterward she talked, and made the convalescent talk, pointedly of other things.
This occurred in the forenoon of a pleasant day in May. In the afternoon of the same day, Miss Grierson's trap was halted before the door of the temporary quarters of the Wahaska Public Library. Raymer saw the trap and crossed the street, remembering--what he would otherwise have forgotten--that his sister had asked him to get a book on orchids.
Miss Margery was in the reference room, wading absently through the newspaper files. She nodded brightly when Raymer entered--and was not in the least dust-blinded by the library card in his hand.
"You are just in time to help me," she told him. "Do you remember the story of that daring bank robbery in New Orleans a few weeks ago?--the one in which a man made the president draw a check and get it cashed for him?"
Raymer did remember it, chiefly because he had talked about it at the time with Jasper Grierson, and had wondered curiously how the president of the Farmers' and Merchants' would deport himself under like conditions.
Since it was tied to his first business interview with Grierson _père_, Raymer was able to recall the date, approximately, and together they turned the file of the _Pioneer Press_ until they came to the number containing the Associated Press story of the crime. It was fairly circumstantial; the young woman at the teller's window figured in it, and there was a sketchy description of the robber.
"If you should meet the man face to face, would you recognise him from the description?" she flashed up at Raymer.
"Not in a thousand years," he confessed. "Would you?"
"No; not from the description," she admitted. Then she passed to a matter apparently quite irrelevant.