He marvelled at the crudity of the questions which he asked himself, and yet he persisted in asking them.

Who was she?
What could be her mission at Tete Jaune Cache?
She had repeated to him what she had said to the girl in the coach--that at Tete Jaune she had no friends.

Beyond that, and her name, she had offered no enlightenment.
In the brief space that he had been with her he had mentally tabulated her age as twenty-eight--no older.

Her beauty alone, the purity of her eyes, the freshness of her lips, and the slender girlishness of her figure, might have made him say twenty, but with those things he had found the maturer poise of the woman.

It had been a flashlight picture, but one that he was sure of.
Several times during the next hour he turned to his work, and at last gave up his efforts entirely.