Waltz Into Darkness

He thrust the bottle at her.

"Get me another of these," he barked. "That's all I want. That's the best the world can do for me now. I don't want your lamps and your broths and your tidying of beds."

But she was brave in the cause of housekeeping cleanliness, this old, spare, colored woman. She sidled in past him before he could stop her, put down the fresh lamp beside the one that had exhausted its fuel, in a moment was pulling and tucking at the bedraggled bed linen, casting an occasional furtive glance toward him, to see if he meant to stop her or not.

She finished, made haste to get out of the room again, coursing the long way around, by the wall, in order not to come too close to him. The door safely in her hand again, she turned and looked at him, where he stood, bottle neck riveted to hand.

And he looked at her.

Suddenly a tremor of unutterable longing seemed to course through him. His rasping bitter voice of a moment ago became gentle. He put out his hand toward her, as if pleading with her to stay, now, to listen to him speak of her, the absent. To speak of her with him.

"Do you remember how she used to sit there cleaning her nails, with a stick tipped with cotton? I can see her now," he said brokenly. "And then she would hold her fingers up, like this, all spread out, and quirk her head, to one side and to the other, looking at them to see if they would do."

Aunt Sarah didn't answer.

"Do you remember her in that green dress, with stripes of lavender? I can see her now, with the sunlight coming from behind her, breeze stirring her gown, standing there on the Canal Street dock. A little wispy parasol open over her."

Aunt Sarah made no reply.

"Do you remember that way she had, of turning in the doorway, each time she was about to leave, and bending her fingers backward, as if she were calling you to her, and saying 'Ta ta!'?"

The old woman's taciturnity burst its floodgates at last, as if she were unable to endure hearing any more. The whites of her eyes dilated righteously and her withered lips drew back from her teeth. She flung up her hand at him, as if enjoining him to silence.

"God must have been angry with you the day He first let you look into that woman's face!"

He stumbled over to the wall, pressed his face against it, arms straight up over his head as if he were trying to claw his way upward toward the ceiling. His voice seemed to come from his stomach, through rolling drums of smothered agony--that were the weeping of a grown man.

"I want her back again. I want her back. I'll never rest until I find her."

"What you want her back again for?" she demanded.

He turned slowly.

"To kill her," he said through his clenched teeth.

He pushed away from the wall, and lurched soddenly to the bed. He overturned an edge of the mattress, and reached below it, and drew something out. Then he slowly raised it, held it in strangulated grip to show her; a bone-handled, steel-barreled pistol.

"With this," he whispered.

21

The audience was streaming out of the Tivoli Theatre, on Royal Street. Gas flames in the jets on the foyer walls and in the ceiling overhead flickered fitfully with the swirl of its crowded passage. The play had been most enjoyable, an adaptation from the French called Papa's Little Mischief, and every animated conversation bore evidence to that.

Once on the sidewalk, the solid mass of people began to disintegrate: the balcony-sitters to walk off in varying directions, the boxholders and orchestra occupants to clamber by twos, and sometimes fours, into successive carriages as they drew up in turn before the theatre entrance, summoned by the colored doorman.

The man lurking back from sight against the shadowy wall, where the brightness failed to reach, was unnoticed, though many passed close enough to touch him.

The crowd drained off at last. The brightness dimmed, as an attendant began to put out the gaslights one by one, with a long, upward-reaching stick that turned their keys.

Only a few laggards were left now, still awaiting their turn at carriage stop. There was no haste, and politeness and deference were the rule.

"After you."

"No, after you, sir. Yours is the next."

And then at last one final couple remain, and are about to enter their carriage. The woman short, and in a lace head-scarf that, drawn close against the insalubrious night air, effectively mists her head and mouth and chin.

Her escort leaves her side for a moment, to see what the delay is in locating their carriage, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, a man is beside her, peering at her closely. She turns her head away, draws the scarf even closer, and edges a step or two aside in trepidation.

He is bending forward now, craning openly, so that he is all but crouched under her lace-blurred face, staring intently up into it..

She gives a cry of alarm and cowers back.

"Julia ?" he whispers questioningly.

She turns in fright the other way, giving him her back.

He comes around before her again.

"Madam, will you lower your scarf?"

"Let me be, or I'll call for help."

He reaches up and flings it aside.

A pair of terrified blue eyes, stranger's eyes, are staring taut at him, aghast.

Her escort comes back at a run, raises his stick threateningly. "Here, sir!" Brings it down once or twice, then discarding it as unsatisfactory, strikes out savagely with his unaided arm.

Durand goes staggering back and sprawls upon the sidewalk.

He makes no move to resist, nor to rise again and retaliate. He lies there extended, on the point of one elbow, passive, spent, dejected. The wild look dies out of his face.

"Forgive me," he sighs. "I thought you were-someone else."

"Come away, Dan. The man must be a little mad."

"No, I'm not mad, madam," he answers her with frigid dignity. "I'm perfectly sane. Too sane."

22

In the front parlor of Madame Jessica's house on Toulouse Street, there was a vivacious evening party going on. Madame Jessica's parlor was both expansive and expensively furnished. The furniture was ivory-white, touched with gold, in the Empire style; the upholstery was crimson damask brocade. Brussels carpeting covered the parquetry floor, and the flickering gas tongues above, in nests of crystal, were like an aurora borealis.

A glossy haired young man sat at the rosewood piano, running over Chopin's "Minute Waltz" with a light but competent touch. One couple were slowly pivoting about in the center of the room, but more absorbed in one another's conversation than in dancing. Two others were on the sofa together, sipping champagne and engaged in sprightly chat. Still a third couple stood together, near the door, likewise lost to their surroundings. Always two by two. The young ladies were all in evening dress. The men were not, but at least all were well groomed and gentlemanly in aspect.

All was decorum, all was elegance and propriety. Madame was strict that way. No voices too loud, no laughter too blaring. None left the room without excusing themselves to the rest of the company.

A colored maid, whose duty it was to announce new arrivals, opened one of the two opposite pairs of parlor-doors and announced: "Mr. Smith." No one smiled, or appeared to pay any attention.

Durand came in, and Madame Jessica crossed the room to greet him cordially in person, arm extended, her sequins winking as she went.

"Good evening, sir. How nice of you to come to see us. May I introduce you to someone?"

"Yes," Durand said quietly.

Madame fluttered her willow fan, put a finger to the corner of her mouth, surveyed the room speculatively, like a good hostess seeking to pair off only those among her guests with the greatest affinity.

"Miss Margot is taken up for the moment--" she said, eying the sofa in passing. "How about Miss Fleurette? She's unescorted." She indicated the opposite pair of doors, leading deeper into the house, which had partially and unobtrusively drawn apart. A tall brunette was standing there, as if casually, in passing by.

"No."

Madame did something with her fan, and the brunette turned and disappeared. A more buxom, titian-haired young woman took her place in the opening.

"Miss Roseanne, then?" Madame suggested enticingly.

He shook his head.

Madame flickered her fan and the opening fell empty.

"You're difficult to please, sir," she said with an uncertain smile.

"Is that--all? Is there--no one else?"

"Not quite. There's our Miss Juliette. I believe she's having a tête-a-tête. If you'd care to wait a few minutes--"

He sat down alone, in a large chair in the corner.

"May I send you over some refreshments ?" Madame asked, bending attentively over him.

He opened his money-fold, passed some money to her.

"Champagne for everyone else. Don't send any over to me."

A colored butler moved among the guests, refilling glasses. The other young men turned, one by one, saluted with their glasses, and bowed an acknowledgement to him. He gravely bowed in return.

Madame must have been favorably impressed, she evidently decided to hasten Miss Juliette's arrival, in some unknown behind-the. scenes manner.

She came back presently to promise: "She'll be down directly. I've sent up word there's a young man down here asking for her."

She left him, then returned to say: "Here she is now. Isn't she just lovely? Everyone's simply mad about her, I declare!"

He saw her in the doorway. She stood for a moment, looking around, trying to identify him.

She was blonde.

She was beautiful.

She was about seventeen.

She was someone else.

Madame bustled over, led her forward through the room, an arm affectionately about her waist.

"Right this way, honey. May I present--"

She gasped. The beautiful creature's eyes opened wide, at the first rebuff she had ever received in her short but crowded life. A puzzled silence momentarily fell upon the animated room.

His chair was empty. The adjacent door, the door leading out, was just closing.

23

Mardi Gras. A city gone mad. A fever that seizes the town every year, on the last Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. "Fat Tuesday." Over and over, for fifty-three years now, since 1827, when the first such celebration started spontaneously, no one knows how. A last fling before the austerities of Lent begin, as though the world of human frailty were ending, never to renew itself. Bacchanalia before recantation, as if to give penance a good hearty cause.

There is no night and there is no day. The lurid glare of flambeaux and of lanterns along Canal and Royal and the other downtown streets makes ruddy sunlight at midnight; and in the daytime the shops are closed, nothing is bought and nothing is sold. Nothing but joy, and that's to be had free. For eight years past, the day has already been a legal holiday, and since that same year, 1872, the Legislature has sanctioned the wearing of masks on the streets this one day.

There is always music sounding somewhere, near or far; as the strains of one street band fade away, in one direction, the strains of another approach, from somewhere else. There are always shouts and laughter to be heard, though they may be out of sight for a moment, around some corner or behind the open windows of some house. Though there may be a lull, along some given street, at some given moment, the Mardi Gras is going on just as surely somewhere else just then; it never stops.

It was during such a momentary lull that the motionless figure stood in a doorway sheltered beneath a gallery, along upper Canal Street. The air was still hazy and pungent with smoky pitch-fumes, the ground was littered with confetti, paper serpentines, shredded balloon skins looking like oddly colored fruit-peelings, a crushed tin horn or two; even a woman's slipper with the heel broken off. The feet of an inebriate protruded perpendicularly from a doorway, the rest of him hidden inside it. Someone had tossed a wreath of flowers, as a funereal offering is placed at the foot of a bier, and deftly looped it about his upturned toes.

But this other figure, in its own particular doorway, was sober, erect. It had donned a papier-mâché false face, out of concession to the carnival spirit; otherwise it was in ordinary men's suiting. The false face was grotesque, a frozen grimace of unholy glee, doubly grotesque in conjunction with the wearied, forlorn, spent posture of the figure beneath it.

A distant din that had been threatening for several moments suddenly burst into full volume, as it came around a corner, and a long chain, a snake dance, of celebrants came wriggling into view, each member gripping waist or shoulders of the person before him. The Mardi Gras was back; the pause, the breathing space, was over.

Torches came with them, and kettle drums and cymbals. The Street lighted up again, as though it had caught fire. Wavering giant-size shadows slithered across the orange faces of the buildings. At once people came back to the windows again on either side of the way. Confetti once more began to snow down, turning rainbowhued as it drifted through varying zones of light; pink, lavender, pale green.

The central procession, the backbone, of dancers was flanked by detached auxiliaries on both sides, singly and in couples, trios, quartettes, who went along with it without being integrated into it. The chain was lengthening every moment, picking up strays, though no one could tell where it was going, and no one cared. Its head had already turned a second corner and passed from sight, before its tail had finished coming around the first. The original lockstep it had probably started with had long been discarded because of its unwieldy length, and now it 'Was a potpourri. Some were doing a cakewalk, prancing with knees raised high before them, others simply shuffling along barely raising feet from the ground, still others jigging, cavorting and kicking up their heels from side to side, like jack-in-the-boxes.

The false face kept switching feverishly, to and fro, forward and back, while the body beneath it remained fixed; centering its ogling eyes on each second successive figure as it passed, following that a moment or two, then dropping that to go back and take up the next but one. The women only, skipping over the clowns, the pirates, the Spanish smugglers, interspersed between.

Ogling, bulging, white-painted eyes, that promised buffoonery and horseplay, ludicrous flirtation and comic impassionment. Anything, but not latent death.

Many saw it, and some waved, and some dlled out in gay invitation, and one or two threw flowers that hit it on the nose. Roman empresses, harem beauties, gypsies, Crusaders' ladies in dunce caps. And a nursemaid in starched apron wheeling a full-grown man before her in a baby's perambulator, his hairy legs dragging out at the sides of it and occasionally taking steps of their own.

Then suddenly the comic popeyes remained fixed, the whole false face and the neck supporting it craned forward, unbearably intent, taut.

She wore a domino-suit, a shapeless bifurcated garb fastened only at the wrists, the ankles and the neck. A cowl covered her head. She wore an eye-mask of light blue silk, but beneath it her mouth was like an unopened bud.

She was no more than five feet two or three, and her step was dainty and graceful. She was not in the cavalcade, she was part of the footloose flotsam coursing along beside it. She was on the far side of it from him, it was between the two of them. She was passing from man to man, dancing a few steps in the arms of each, then quitting him and on to someone else. Thus progressing, with not a step, not a turn, wasted uncompanioned. She was a sprite of sheer gayety.

Just then her hood was dislodged, thrown back for a moment, and before she could recover and hastily return it, he had glimpsed the golden hair topping the blue mask.

He threw up his arm and shouted "Julia!" He launched himself from the door niche and three times dashed himself against the impeding chain, trying to get through to her side, and three times was thrown back by its unexpected resiliency.

"No one breaks through us," they told him mockingly. "Go all the way back to the end, and around, if you must cross over."

Suddenly she seemed to become aware of him. She halted for a moment and was looking straight across at him. Or seemed to be. He heard the high-pitched bleat of her laughter, in all that din, at sight of his comic face. She flung her arm out at him derisively. Then turned and went on again.

He plunged into the maelstrom, and like a drowning man trying to keep his head above water, was engulfed, swept every way but the way he wanted to go.

At last a Viking in a horned helmet, one of the links in the impeding chain, took pity on him.

"He sees someone he likes," he shouted jocularly. "It's Mardi Gras, after all. Let him through." And with brawny arms raised like a drawbridge for a moment, let him duck under them to the other side.

She was still intermittently in sight, but far down ahead. Like a light blue cork bobbing in a littered sea.

"Julia!"

She turned ful'y this time, but whether at sound of the name or simply because of the strength of his voice could not have been determined.

He saw her crouch slightly, as if taunting him to a mock chase. A chase in which there was no terror, only playfulness, coquetry, a deliberate incitement to pursuit. A moment later she had fled away deftly, slipping easily in and out because of her small size. But looking back every now and again.

It was obvious she didn't know who he was, but thought him simply an anonymous pursuer from out of the Mardi Gras, someone to have sport with. Once when he thought he had lost her altogether, and would have had she willed it so, for she purposely halted aside in a doorway and remained there waiting for him to single her out once more. Then when he had done so, and there could be no mistake, she drew out her clown-like suit wide at the sides, dipped him a mocking curtsey, and sped on again.

At last, with àne more backward look at him, as if to say: "Enough of this. I've set a high enough price on your approaching me. Now have your way with me, whatever it is to be," she turned aside from the main stream of the revelers and darted down a dimly lighted alley.

He reached its mouth in turn moments later, and could still see the paleness of her light blue garb running ahead in the gloom. He turned and went in. There were no more obstacles here, nothing to keep him back. In a minute or two he had overtaken her, and had her back against the wall, his raised arms, planted against it, a barrier on either side of her.

She couldn't speak. She was too winded. She leaned back against the wall, in expectation of dalliance, the fruits of the chase now to be enjoyed alike by both of them. He could make out the pale blue mask shimmering there before him in the dark.. The red and yellow glare of torches was kept to the mouth of this side street, this byway; it couldn't reach in to where they were. It was twilight dim. It was the very place for it--

He tried to lift the mask from her face and she warded him off, shunting her head aside. She tittered a little, and fanned herself limply with her own hand, to create additional air for breath.

"Julia," he panted full into her face. "Julia."

She tittered again.

"Now I've got you."

He looked around where the light was, where the crowd was still streaming by, as if in measurement.

Then his hand fumbled under his clothing and he took out the bone-handled pistol he'd carried with him throughout the Mardi Gras. She didn't see it for a moment, it was held low, below the level of their eyes.

Then he pulled at his own false face, and it fell to the ground.

"Now do you know me, Julia? Now do you see who I am?"

His elbow backed, and the gun went out away from her, to find room. It clicked as he thumbed back the hammerhead.

It came forward again. It found that empty place, where in others a heart was known to be.

Then he ripped ruthlessly at the eye-mask and pared it from her. The hood went back with it, and the blonde hair was revealed. She saw the gun at the same time that he saw her face fully.

"No, doan', mister, doan'--" she whimpered abjectly. "I din' mean no harm. I was jes foolin', jes foolin'--" She tried to grovel to the ground, but the taut closeness of his arms kept her up in spite of herself.

"Why, you're a--you're a--"

"Please, mister, I cain't help it if I doan' match up right--"

There was a sodden futile impact as the bone-handled gun fell beside him to the ground.

24

The room was a still life. Forget-me-nots on pink wallpaper in the background. In the foreground a table. On the table a reeking tumbler, an overturned bottle drained to its dregs, a prone head. Nothing moved. Nothing had feeling, or awareness.

A still life entitled "Despair."

25

The Commissioner of Police of the city of New Orleans was the average man of his own métier, no more, no less. Fifty-seven years of age, weight two hundred and one pounds, height five feet ten, silver-black hair, now growing bald, caracul-like beard, parted in two, a poor dresser, high principled, but not beyond the point of normalcy, a hard worker, married, obliged to use spectacles only when reading, and subject to a mild form of kidney trouble. Not brilliant, but not dull; the former certainly more of a disqualification in a public civil servant than the latter.

His office, in the Police Headquarters Building, was not particularly prepossessing, but since it was not for social usage but strictly for work, this doubtless was of no great moment. It had a certain fustian atmosphere which was perhaps inescapable in an administrative business office of its type. Ivory wallpaper rapidly turning brown with age (and unevenly so) adhered to the walls, with pockets and bulges where it had warped; it dated at least from the Van Buren administration. A green carpet, faded sickly yellow, covered the floor. A gaslight chandelier of four burners within reversed tulipshaped soapy-iridescent glass cups hung from the ceiling. The commissioner's desk, massed with papers, was placed so that he sat with his back to the window and those he interview&j had the disadvantage of the light in their faces.

His secretary opened the door, closed it at his back, and then announced: "There's a gentleman out here to see you, sir."

The commissioner looked up only briefly from a report he was considering. "About what? Have him state his business," he said in a rumbling deep-welled baritone.

The secretary retired, conferred, returned.

"It's a personal matter, for your ears alone, sir. I suggested he write, but he claims that cannot be done either. He begs you to give him just a moment of your time."

The commissioner sighed unwillingly. "All right. Interrupt us in five minutes, Harris. Make sure of that, now."

The secretary held the door back, motioned permission with two upraised fingers, and an old man entered. A haggard, dejected, beaten old man of thirty-seven.

The secretary withdrew to begin his five-minute count.

The commissioner put aside the report he had been consulting, nodded with impersonal civility. "Good day, sir. Will you be as brief as possible? I have a number of matters here--" He swept an arm rather vaguely past his own desk top.

"I'll try to, sir. I appreciate your giving me your time."

The commissioner liked that. He was favorably impressed so far.

"Will you have a chair, sir?"

He would give him at least his allotted five minutes, if not more. He looked as if he had suffered greatly; yet behind that there was certain surviving innate dignity visible, conducive to respect rather than mawkish pity.

The visitor sat down in a large black leather chair, lumpy with broken spring-coils.

"Now, sir," prodded the commissioner, to discourage any inclination toward dilatoriness.

"My name is Louis Durand. I was married on May the twentieth, last, to a woman who came from St. Louis and called herself Julia Russell. I had never seen her before. I have the certificate of marriage here with me. On the fifteenth of June last she withdrew fifty thousand dollars from my bank account and disappeared. I have not seen her since. I want a warrant issued for the arrest of this woman. I want her apprehended, brought to trial, and the money returned to me."

The commissioner said nothing for some time. It was obvious that this was not inattention or disinterest, but on the contrary a sudden excessive amount of both. It was equally obvious that he was rephrasing the story, to himself, in his own mind; marshalling it into his own thought-symbols, so to speak; familiarizing himself with it, the better to have it at his command.

"May I see the certificate ?" he said at last.

Durand produced, tendered it to him.

He read it carefully, but said nothing further in respect to it. In fact, he asked but two questions more, both widely spaced, but both highly pertinent.

One was: "You said you had never seen her before; how was that ?"

Durand explained the nature of the courtship, and added, moreover, that he believed her not to be the woman he had proposed to, but an impostor. He gave the reasons for that belief, but admitted he had no proof.

The commissioner's second and final question, spoken through steeple-joined fingers, was:

"Did she forge your name in order to withdraw the funds?"

Durand shook his head. "She signed her own. I had given her authorization with the bank to do so; given her access to the accounts."

The five minutes' grace had expired. The door opened and young Harris wedged head and one shoulder through, said: "Excuse me, Commissioner, but I have a report here for you to--"

Countermanding his former instructions, the commissioner silenced him with a sweep of his hand.

He addressed Durand with leisurely deliberation, showing that the interview was not being terminated on that account, but for reasons implicit in its own nature. "I would like to talk this matter over with my associates first," he admitted, "before I take any action. It's a curious sort of case, quite unlike anything that's come my way before. If you'll allow me to keep this marriage certificate for the time being, I'll see that it's returned to you. Suppose you come back tomorrow at this same time, Mr. Durand."

And turning, he enjoined his secretary with unmistakable emphasis: "Harris, I'm seeing Mr. Durand tomorrow morning at this same hour. Make sure my appointments allow for it."

"Thank you, Mr. Commissioner," Durand said, rising.

"Don't thank me for anything yet. Let us wait and see first."

26

"Have a chair, Mr. Durand," the commissioner said, after having offered his hand.

Durand did so, waited.

The commissioner collected his words, ranged them in mind, and at last delivered them. "I'm sorry. I find that there's nothing we can do for you. Nothing whatever. And by we, I mean the police department of this city."

"What?" Durand was stunned. His head went back against the spongy black leather of the chair-back. His hat fell from his grasp and his lap, and it was the commissioner who retrieved it for him. He could hardly speak for a moment. "You--you mean a strange woman, a stray, can come along, perpetrate a mock marriage with a man, abscond with fifty thousand dollars of his money--and--and you say you can do nothing about it--?"

"Just a moment," the commissioner said, speaking with patient kindliness. "I understand how you feel, but just a moment." He offered him the certificate of marriage which he had retained from the previous day.

Durand crushed it in his hand, swept it aside in a disgusted fling. "This--this valueless forgery--I"

"The first point which must be made clear before we go any further is this," the commissioner told him. "This is not a counterfeit. That marriage is not a mock one." He underscored his words. "That woman is legally your wife."

Durand's stupefaction this time was even worse than before. He was aghast. "She is not Julia Russell! That is not her name ! If I am married at all, I am married to Julia Russell, whoever and wherever she may be-- This is a marriage by proxy, if you will call it that-- But this woman was someone else!"

"There is where you are wrong." The commissioner told off each word with the heavy thump of a single fingerpad to the desk top. "I have consulted with the officials of the church where it was performed, and I have consulted as well with our own lay experts in jurisprudence. The woman who stood beside you in the church was married to you in person, and not by proxy for another. No matter what name she gave, false or true, no matter if she had said she was the daughter of the President of the United States, heaven forbid I--she is your lawfully wedded wife, in civil law and in religious canon; she and only she and she alone. And nothing can make her otherwise. You can have it annulled, of course, on the ground of misrepresentation, but that is another matter--"

"My God!" Durand groaned.

The commissioner rose, went to the water cooler, and drew him a cup of water. He ignored it.

"And the money ?" he said at last, exhaustedly. "A woman can rob a man of his life savings, under your very noses, and you cannot help him, you cannot do anything for him? What kind of law is that, that punishes the honest and protects malefactors? A woman can walk into a man's house and--"

"No. Now hold on. That brings us back again to where we were. A woman cannot do that, and remain immune to reprisal. But a woman, just any woman at all, did not do that, in your case."

"But--"

"Your wife did that. And the law cannot touch her for it. You gave her signed permission to do just what she did. Mr. Simms at the bank has shown me the authorization card. Under such circumstances, where a joint account exists, a wife cannot steal from her husband, a husband from his wife."

He glanced sorrowfully around at the window behind him.

"She could pass by this building this very minute, out there in the street, and we could not detain her, we could not put a hand upon her."

Durand let his shoulders slump forward, crushed. "You don't believe me, then," was all he could think of to say. "That there's been some sort of foul play concealed in the background of this. That one woman started from St. Louis to be my wife, and another suddenly appeared here in her place--"

"We believe you, Mr. Durand. We believe you thoroughly. Let me put it this way. We agree with you thoroughly in theory; in practice we cannot lift a hand to help you. It is not that we are unwilling. If we were to make an arrest, we could not hold the person, let alone force restitution of the funds. The whole case is circumstantial. No crime has been proven committed as yet. You went to the dock to meet one woman, you met another in her stead. A substitution in itself is no crime. It may be, how shall I say it, a personal treachery, a form of trickery, but it is no crime recognized by law. My advice to you is--"

Durand smiled witheringly. "Forget the whole thing."

"No, no. Not at all. Go to St. Louis and start working from that end. Get proof that a crime, either of abduction or even something worse, was committed against the true Julia Russell. Now listen to my words carefully. I said get proof. A letter in someone else's handwriting is proof only that--it is a letter in someone else's handwriting. Dresses that are too big are only--dresses that are too big. I said get proof that a crime was committed. Then take it--" He wagged his forefinger solemnly back and forth, like a pendulum-- "not to us, but to whichever are the authorities within whose jurisdiction you have the proof to show it happened. That means, if on the river, to whichever onshore community lies closest to where it happened."

Durand brought his whole fist down despairingly on the commissioner's desk top, like a mallet. "I hadn't realized until now," he said furiously, "there were so many opportunities for a malefactor to commit an offense and escape scot-free ! It seems to me it pays to flout the law! Why bother to observe it when--"

"The law as we apply it in this country," the commissioner said forebearingly, "leans backward to protect the innocent. In one or two rare cases, such as your own, it may work an injustice against an honest accuser. In a hundred times a hundred others, it has preserved an innocent person from unjust accusation, false arrest, wrongful trial, and maybe even capital punishment, which cannot be undone once it has taken place. The laws of the Romans, which govern many foreign countries, say a man is guilty until proven innocent. The Anglo-Saxon common law, which governs us here, says a man is innocent until he is proven guilty."

He sighed deeply. "Think that over, Mr. Durand."

"I understand," Durand said at last, raising his head from its wilted, downcast position. "I'm sorry I lost my temper."

"If I had been tricked into marriage," the commissioner told him, "and swindled out of fifty thousand dollars, I would have lost my own temper, and far worse than you just did yours. But that doesn't alter one whit of what I just told you. It still stands as I explained it to you."

Durand rose with wearied deliberation, ran two fingers down the outer sideward crease of each trouser leg to restore them. "I'll go up to St. Louis and start from there," he said with tight-lipped grimness. "Good day," he added briefly.

"Good day," the other echoed.

Durand crossed to the door, swung it inward to go out.

"Durand," the commissioner called out as an afterthought.

Durand turned his head to him.

"Don't take the law into your own hands."

Durand paused in the opening, held back his answer for a moment, as though he hadn't heard him.

"I'll try not to," he said finally, and went on out.

27

The City of Baton Rouge reached the St. Louis dockside at 6 P.M., days later. That was Wednesday, the eleventh.

He'd never been in the town before, but where a year ago he would have relished and appreciated all its differences, its novelty: its brisker, more bustling air than languorous New Orleans, its faintly Germanic over-all aspect, impalpable but still very patent to one who came from the French-steeped city down-river; now his heart was too heavy to care or note anything about it, other than that his trip was at an end, and this was the place where it had ended; this was the place that was going to solve the riddle for him, decide his problem, settle his fate.

It was a cloudy day, but even in its cloudiness there was something spruce, tangy, lacking in New Orleans overcasts. There was energy in the air; less of graciousness, considerably more of ugliness.

It was, to him at any rate, the North; the farthest north he'd yet been.

He had Bertha Russell's address ready at hand, of course, but because of the advanced hour, and perhaps also without realizing it because of a latent cowardice, that strove to put off the climactic ordeal for as long as possible, he decided to find himself quarters in a hotel first before setting out to locate and interview this unknown woman upon whom all now depended.

He emerged cityward of the pier shed, was immediately accosted with upraised whips by a small bevy of coachmen gathered hopefully about, and climbed into one of their vehicles at random.

"Find me some kind of a hotel," he said glumly. "Nothing fancy. And not too far into the town."

"Yes sir. The Commercial Travelers' be about right, I reckon. Just a stone's throw from here."

Even the colored people spoke more rapidly up here than at home, he noted with dulled detachment.

The hotel was a dingy, beery, waterfront place, but it served his purpose well enough to be accepted. He was given key and directions and allowed to find his own way to a cheerless bedroom with an almost viewless window, triply blocked by a brick abutment, a film of congealed dust ground into its panes, and a dank curtain, its pores long-since sealed by soilage. But twilight was already blurring the air, and he wouldn't have looked forth even if he could. He hadn't come here to enjoy a view.

He dropped his bag and settled down with heavy despondency in a chair, to chafe his wrists and brood.

He pictured again the scene to come, as he had been doing all day on the boat, and the night before. Heard again the reassuring voice he hoped to hear. "She was always wild, Mr. Durand; our Julia was like that. This isn't the first time she has run away. She will come back to you again, never fear. When you least look for her, she will suddenly return and ask your forgiveness."

He must want it to be that way, he realized, always to shape it so in his imaginings. To be assured that she was the actual Julia; a cheat, a robber, an absconder, but still the person she had represented herself to be. Why, he wondered, why?

Because anonymity meant her loss would be even more complete, more irremediable. Anonymity meant she was gone forever, there was not even a she to hope to find some day, there was nothing left him.

Or was it because the alternative to her still being Julia was something still darker, even worse, the very thought of which sent a shudder coursing through him.

And then he remembered the letter, that Bertha had said was in a stranger's handwriting, and--all his hope was taken away.

He quitted his room presently and went down and tried to eat something in the wholly unprepossessing dining room connected with the hotel, a typical traveling salesman sort of eating place, filled with smoke, noisy with boastful voices, and with not a woman in the place; he ate out of sheer habit and without knowing what it was he ate. Then, sitting there with a cup of viscous, stone-cold coffee untouched before him, he suddenly noted that it was nearing nine on the large, yellowing clockface aloft on the wall, and decided to carry out his errand then and there and have done with it, without waiting for morning. To try to sleep on it would be agonizing, unbearable. He wanted it over, whether for best or worst; he wanted to know at once, he couldn't stand the uncertainty another half-hour.

He went back to his room for a moment, got the, sister's two letters, his marriage certificate, and all the other pertinent memoranda of the matter, gathered them into one readily accessible pocket, came down, found a coach, and gave the address.

He couldn't tell much about the house from the outside in the gloom. It seemed large enough. The upper part of its silhouette sloped back, meaning it had a mansard roof. It was in a vicinity of eminent cleanliness and respectability. Trees lined the streets, and the streets were lifeless with the absence within doors, where lawabiding citizens belonged at this hour, of those who dwelt hereabout. An occasional gas lamppost twinkled like a lime-colored glowworm down the vista of trees. A church steeple sliced like a stubby black knife upward against the brickdust-tinted sky, paler than earth because of its luminous low-massed cloud banks.

As for the house itself, orange lamp shine showed through a pair of double windows on the lower floor, the rest were in darkness. Someone, at least, was within.

He got out and fumbled for money.

"Wait for you, sir?" the man asked.

"No," he said reluctantly, "no. I don't know how long I'm going to have to be." And yet he almost hated to see the coach turn about and go off and leave him there cut off, as it were, and helpless to retreat now at the last moment, as he felt sorely tempted to do.

He went over to the door and found a small bone pushbutton, and thumbed it flat.

There was a considerable wait, but he forebore from ringing again.

Then presently, but very gradually, as if kindled by the approach of light from a distance, a fanlight that had been invisible to him until now slowly glowed into alternating bands of dark red and colorless glass.

A woman's voice called through the door, "Who is it, please? What did you wish ?"

She lived alone, judging by these characteristic precautions.

"I'd like to speak to Miss Bertha Russell, please," he called back. "It's important."

"Just a moment, please."

He could hear a bolt forced out, then the catch of a finger lock being turned. Then the door opened, and she was standing there surveying him, kerosene lamp held somewhat raised in one hand so that its rays could reach out to and fall upon him for her own satisfaction.

She was about fifty, or very close upon it. She was a tall, largebuilt woman, but not stout withal; she gave an impression of angularity, rather. Her color was not good; it had a waxlike yellowishness, as of one who has worried and kept indoors for a considerable period. Her hair, coarse and glossy, was in the earlier stages of turning gray. Still dark at the back, it was above the forehead that the first slanting, upward wedges of white had appeared, and the way she wore it emphasized rather than attempted to conceal this: drawn severely back, so tight that it seemed to be pulled-at, and then carelessly wound into a knot. It gave her an aspect of sternness that might not have been wholly justified, though in truth there was little humor or tenderness to be read in her features even by themselves.

She wore a dress of stiff black alpaca, a stringy white crocheted collar closing its throat and fastened by a carnelian brooch.

"Yes" she said on a rising inflection. "I'm Bertha Russell. Do I know you?"

"I'm Louis Durand," he replied gravely. "I've just arrived from New Orleans."

He heard her draw a sharp breath. She stared for a long moment, as if familiarizing herself with him. Then abruptly slanted the door still further inward. "Come in, Mr. Durand," she said. "Come in the house."

She closed the street door behind him. He waited aside, then he once more let her take the lead.

"This way," she said. "The parlor's in here."

He followed her down a dark-floored, rag-carpeted hall, and in at one side. She must have been reading when he interrupted; as she set the lamp down on a center table, a massive, open, gilt-edged book swam into view, a pair of silver-edged spectacles discarded to one side. He recognized it as the Bible. A ribbon of crimson velvet protruded as a bookmark.

"Wait, I'll put on more light."

She lit a second lamp, evening the radius of brightness somewhat, so that it did not all come from one place. The room still remained anything but brilliant.

"Sit down, Mr. Durand."

She sat across the table from him, where she had originally been sitting while still alone. She drew the ribbon marker through the new place in the Bible, closed the heavy cubical volume, moved it slightly aside.

He could see her throbbing with a mixture of excitement and anticipatory fear. It was almost physical, it was so strong an agitation; and yet so strongly quelled.

She clasped her hands with an effort, and placed them against the edge of the table, where the Bible had been until now.

She moistened the bloodless outline of her lips.

"Now what can you tell me? What have you come here to say to me?"

"It's not what I can tell you," he replied. "It's what you can tell me."

She nodded somewhat dourly, as though, while disagreeing with the challenge, she was willing nonetheless to accept it, for the sake of progressing with the matter.

"Very well, then. I can tell you this much. My sister Julia received a proposal of marriage from you, by letter, on about the fifteenth of April of this year. Do you deny that ?"

He brushed away the necessity of a direct answer to that; held silent to let her continue.

"My sister Julia left here on May the eighteenth, to join you in New Orleans." Her eyes bored into his. "That was the last I saw of her. Since that date I have not heard from her again." She drew a long, tightly compressed breath. "I received an answer to one of my letters in a stranger's handwriting. And now you come here alone."

"There is no one down there any longer I could bring."

He saw her eyes widen, but she waited.

"Just a moment," he said. "I think it will save both of us time if we establish one thing before we go any--"

Then suddenly he stopped, without need of completing the sentence. He'd found the answer for himself, looking upward to the wall, past her shoulder. It was incredible that he had failed to see it until now, but his whole attention had been given to her and not to the surroundings, and it was subdued by the marginal shade beyond the lamps.

It was a large photographic portrait, set in a cherry-colored velour frame, of a head nearly life-size. The subject was not young, not a girl. There was an incisiveness to the mouth that promised sharpness. There was a keen appearance to the eyes that heralded creases. She was not beautiful. Dark hair, gathered at the back. . .

Bertha had risen, was standing slightly aside from it, holding the lamp aloft and backward to it past her own shoulder, so that it was in fullest untramelled pathway of the upsurging glow.

"That is Julia. That is my sister. There. Before you. What you are looking at now. It's an enlargement taken only two or three years ago."

His voice was a whisper that barely reached her. "Then it was-- not she I married."

She hastily put the lamp down, at what it showed her now in the opposite direction. "Mr. Durand!" She half started toward him, as if to support him. "Can I get you something?"

He warded her off with a vague lift of his hand. He could hear his labored breathing sounding in his own ears like a bellows. He sought the chair he had risen from and by his own efforts dropped back into it, half turned to clutch at it and hold it steady as he did so.

He extended his hand and pointed a finger; the finger switching up and down while it waited for his lips to gain speech and catch up to it. "That is the woman whose photograph I received from here. But that is not the woman I was married to in New Orleans on last May the eighteenth."

Her own fright, which was ghastly on her face, was overruled, submerged, by the sight of his, which must have been that much greater to witness.

"I'll get you some wine," she offered hastily.

He raised his hand protestingly. Pulled at his collar to ease it.

"I'll get you some wine," she repeated helplessly.

"No, I'm all right. Don't take the time."

"Have you a photograph, any sort of likeness, of the other person you can show me ?" she asked after a moment.

"I have nothing, not a scrap of anything. She somehow even postponed having our bridal photograph taken. It occurs to me now that this oversight may have been intentional."

He smiled bleakly. "I can tell you what she was like, if that will do. I don't need a photograph to remember that. She was blonde. She was small. She was a good deal--I should say somewhat younger than your sister." He faltered to a stop, as if realizing the uselessness of proceeding.

"But Julia ?" she persisted, as though he were able to give her the answer. "Where's Julia, then? What's become of her? Where is she?" She planted her hands in flat despair on the tabletop, leaned over above them. "I saw her off on that boat."

"I met the boat. It came without her. She wasn't on it."

"You're sure, you're sure ?" Her eyes were bright with questioning tears.

"I watched them get off it. All left it. She wasn't among them. She wasn't on it."

She sank back into the chair beyond the table. She planed the edge of her hand flat across the top of her forehead, held her head thus for a moment or two. She did not weep, but her mouth winced flickeringly once or twice.

They both had to face the thing. It was out in the open between them now. Not to be avoided, not to be shunned. It had come to this. It was a question of which of them would first put it into words.

She did.

She let her hand drop. "She was done away with!" she whispered noarsely. "She met her end on that boat." She shuddered as though some insidious evil presence had come into the room, without need of door or window. "In some way, at someone's hands." She shuddered again, almost as if she had the ague. "Between the time I waved her goodbye that Wednesday afternoon--"

He let his head go down slowly in grim assent. Convinced now at last, understanding the whole thing finally for what it really was. He finished it for her.

"--and the time I stood by the gangplank to greet her that Friday afternoon."

28

He found Bertha Russell, coated, gloved and bonnetted, a spectral figure in the unrelieved black of full mourning, waiting for him in the open doorway of her house, early as it was, when he drove up shortly before nine the following morning to keep their appointment prearranged the night before. Whatever grief or bitterness had been hers during the unseen hours of the night just gone, she had mastered it now, there were only faint traces of it left behind. Her face was cold and stonelike in its fortitude; there were, however, bluish bruises under her eyes, and the transparent pallor of sleeplessness lay livid upon her features. It was the face of a woman bent upon retribution, who would show no more mercy than had been shown her, whatever the cost to herself.

"Have you breakfasted ?" she asked him when he had alighted and come forward to join her.

"I have no wish to," he answered shortly.

She closed the door forthwith and made her way beside him to the carriage; the impression conveyed was that she would have served him food if obliged to, but would have begrudged the time it would have cost them.

"Have you anyone in mind ?" he asked as they drove off. She had given an address, unfamiliar to him as all addresses up here were bound to be, on entering the carriage.

"I made inquiries after you left last evening. I have had someone recommended to me. He was well spoken of."

They were driven downtown into the bustling business section, the strange pair that they made, both so tight-lipped, both sitting so stark and straight, with not a word between them. The carriage stopped at last before a distinctly ugly-looking building, of beefy red brick, honeycombed with countless windows in four parallel rows, all with rounded tops. A veritable hive of small individual offices and businesses. Its appearance did not bespeak a very prosperous class of tenantry.

Durand paid off the carriage and accompanied her in. A rather chill musty air, far cooler than that outside on the street, immediately assailed them, as well as a considerable lessening of light, in no wise ameliorated by the bowls of gaslight bracketed at very sparing intervals along its corridors.

She consulted a populous directory-chart on the wall, but without tracing her finger down it, and had quitted it again before he could gain an inkling of whose name she sought.

They had to climb stairs, the building offered no lift. Following her up, first one flight, then a second, at last a third, he received the impression she would have climbed a mountain, Everest itself, to gain her objective. They were, she had told him, ancestrally of Holland-Dutch stock, she and her sister. He had never seen such silent stubbornness expressed in anyone as he did in every move of her hard-pressed laboring body on those stairs. She was more dreadfully inflexible in her stolid purpose than any passionate, quickgesturing Creole of the Southland could have been. He couldn't help but admire her; and, for a moment, he couldn't help but wonder what sort of wife the other one, Julia, would have made him.

At the third landing stage they turned off down endless reaches of arterial passageway, even more poorly lighted than below, and in sections that were not of one level, some higher than others, some lower.

"It doesn't indicate very much prosperity in business, would you say?" he remarked idly, without thinking.

"It bespeaks honesty," she answered shortly, "and that is what I seek."

He regretted having made the observation.

She stopped at the very last door of all but one.

On a shield of blown glass set into its upper-half was painted in rounded formation, to make two matching arcs:

Walter Downs

Private Investigator.

Durand knocked for the two of them, and a rich baritone, throbbing with its own depth, vibrated "Come in." He opened the doors stood aside for Bertha Russell, and then entered behind her.

The light was greater on the inside, by virtue of the street beyond. It was a single room, and even less affluent in aspect than the building that housed it had promised it would be. A large but extremely worn desk divided it nearly in two, with the occupant on one side of it, the visitors--all visitors--on the other. On this other side there were two chairs, no more, one of them a negligible canebottomed affair. On the first side there was a small iron safe, its corners rusted, its face left ajar. Not accidentally, for several ledgers which protruded, and an unsorted mass of papers which topped them, seemed to have rendered it incapable of closing.

The man sitting in the midst of this rather unappetizing enclave was in his early forties, Durand's senior by no more than two or three years. His hair was sand colored, and still copious, save for an indented recession over each temple, which heightened his brow and gave his face somewhat of a leonine look. He was, uncommonly enough for his age in life, totally clean-shaven, even on the upper lip. And paradoxically, instead of lending an added youth, this idiosyncrasy on the contrary seemed to increase his look of maturity, so strong were the basic lines of his face and particularly of his mouth. His eyes were blue, and on the surface there was something kindly and humane about them. Yet deeper within there was an occasional glint of something to be caught at times, some tiny blue spark, that hinted at fanaticism. They were at any rate the steadiest Durand had ever met. They were sure of themselves and attentive as those of a judge.

"Am I speaking to Mr. Downs?" he heard Bertha say.

"You are, madam," he rumbled.

There was nothing ingratiating about his manner. Intentionally so, that is. It was as if he were withholding himself from commitment, to see whether the clients met with his approval, rather than he with theirs.

And so Durand was looking for the first time at Walter Downs. Out of a hundred lives that cross a particular one, during its single span, ninety-nine leave no trace, beyond the momentary swirl of their passing. And yet a hundredth may come that will turn it aside, deflect it from its course, alter it so, like a powerful cross-current, that where it was going before and where it goes thereafter are no longer recognizably the same direction.

"There is a chair, madam." He had not risen.

She sat down. Durand remained standing, breaking his posture with a shoulder occasionally against the wall to ease himself.

"I am Bertha Russell and this is Mr. Louis Durand."

He gave Durand a curt nod, no more.

"We have come to you about a matter that concerns both of us."

"Which one of you will speak, then ?"

"You speak for the two of us, Mr. Durand. That will be easiest, I think."

Durand, looking down at the floor as if reading the words from it, took a moment to begin. But Downs, who had now altered the position of his head to direct his gaze upon him exclusively, showed no impatience.

The story seemed so old already, so often told. He kept his voice low, left all emphasis out of it.

"I corresponded with this lady's sister, from New Orleans, where I was, to here, where she was. I offered marriage, she accepted. She left here to join me, on May the eighteenth last. Her sister saw her off. She never arrived. Another person altogether joined me in New Orleans when the boat arrived, managed to convince me that she was Miss Russell's sister in spite of the difference in their appearances, and we were married. She stole upward of fifty thousand dollars from me, and disappeared in turn. The police down there inform me that they cannot do anything about it for lack of proof that the original person I proposed marriage to was done away with. The impersonation and the theft are not punishable by law."

Downs said only three words.

"And you want?"

"We want you to obtain proof that a murder was committed. We want you to obtain proof of the murder that we both know must have been committed. We want you to trace and apprehend this woman who was a chief participant in it." He took a deep, hot breath. "We want it punished."

Downs nodded dourly. He looked thoughtfully.

They waited. He remained silent for so long that at last Durand, almost feeling he had forgotten that they were present, cleared his throat as a reminder.

"Will you take this case?"

"I have taken it already," Downs answered with an impatient offgesture of his hand, as if to say: Don't interrupt me.

Durand and Bertha Russell looked at one another.

"I made up my mind to take it while you were still telling me of it," he went on presently. "It is the kind of a case I like. You are both honest people. As far as you are concerned, sir--" He raised his eyes suddenly to Durand; "You must be. Only an honest man could have been such a fool as you appear to have been."

Durand flushed, but didn't answer.

"And I am a fool, too. I have not had a client in here for over a week before you came to me today. But if I had not liked the case, nevertheless I would not have taken it."

Something about him made Durand believe that.

"I cannot promise you I will succeed in solving it. I can promise you one thing and one only: I will never quit it again until I do solve it."

Durand reached for his money-fold. "If you will be good enough to tell me what the customary--"

"Pay me whatever you care to, to be put down against expenses," Downs said almost indifferently. "When they outrun whatever it is, if they should, I'll let you know."

"Just a moment." Bertha Russell interrupted Durand, opening her purse.

"No, please--I beg you-- It's my obligation," he protested.

"This is no matter of parlor gentility!" she said to him almost fiercely. "She was my sister. I am entitled to the right of sharing the expense with you. I demand it. You shall not take that from me."

Downs looked at them both. "I see I was not mistaken," he murmured. "This is a fitting case."

He picked up a copy of that morning's newspaper, first shook it to spread it full, then narrowed it once more to the span of a single perpendicular column. He traced his finger down this, a row of paid commercial advertisements.

"This boat she sailed on from here," he said, "was which one?"

"The City of New Orleans," Durand and Bertha Russell said in unison.

"By a coincidence," he said, "here it is down again, for the company's next sailing. Its turn has come about once more, it leaves frqm here tomorrow, at nine o'clock in the forenoon."

He put the paper down.

"Do you propose remaining here, Mr. Durand?"

"I'm returning to New Orleans at once, now that I've put this matter in your hands," Durand said. Then he added wryly, "My business is there."

"Good," Downs remarked, rising and reaching for his hat. "Then we'll both be sailing together, for I'm going down there now and get my ticket. We will begin by retracing her steps, making the same journey she did, on the same boat, with the same captain and the same crew. Someone may have seen something, someone may remember. Someone must."

29

The cabins of the City of New Orleans were small, little better than shoeboxes ranged side by side along the shelves of a shop. The one they shared together seemed even smaller than the rest, perhaps because they were both in it at once. Even to move about and hang their things, they had continually to flatten themselves and swerve aside to avoid grazing and knocking into one another at every step.

Outside in the failing light two soiled ribbons, the lower gray, the upper tan, could be seen unrolling through the window; the Mississippi's bosom and its shore.

"I will help in any way I can," Durand offered. "Just tell me what to do and how to go about it."

"The passengers will not be the same on this trip as on that other," Downs told him. "That would be too much to hope for. Those who will be, are those whose job it is to run the boat and tend it. We will share them between us, from the captain down to the stokers. And if we find out nothing, we are no worse off than before. And if we find out something, no matter what, we are that much better off. So don't be discouraged. This may take months and years, and we are just at the very beginning of it."

"And what is it you--we-try to find out, now, for a beginning?"

"We try to find a witness who saw them both together; and by that I do not necessarily mean in one another's company: the true Julia and the false. I mean, both alive and on the boat during one and the same trip, at one and the same time. For the sister is a witness that the true one left on it, and you are a witness that the false one arrived on it. What I am trying to arrive at, by a process of elimination, is when was the true one last seen, when the false one first? I mark that off, as closely as I can get it, against that out there-" he gestured toward the two ribbons, "and that gives me, roughly, the point during the voyage at which it happened, the State whose jurisdiction it falls within, and the area in which to devote myself to searching for the only evidence, if any, there will ever be."

Durand didn't ask him what he meant by that last. Perhaps a chill sensation running down his back told him only too well.

The captain was named Fletcher. He was deliberate of speech; the type of man who thinks well before speaking, and thus later does not have to think ill of what he has spoken. His memory, by way of his hand, sought refreshment in his luxuriant black beard.

"Yes," he said at long last, after hearing Downs's exhaustive description. "Yes, I do recall a little lady such as you describe. The breeze caught up her skirt just as we were both coming along the deck from opposite directions. And she quickly held it down with her hands. But for a moment--" He didn't finish it; his eyes, however, were reminiscently kind. "Then as I passed, I tipped my cap. She dropped her eyes and would not see me-" he gave a little chuckle; "yet as she passed, she smiled, and I know the smile was for me, for there was no one else in sight."

"And now this one," Downs said.

He offered in assistance a small photograph of Julia, supplied them by Bertha, much similar to the one once owned by Durand.

The captain studied it at length, but with no great relish; and then after that ruminated a considerable while longer.

"No," he said at last. "No, I've never seen this old mai-- this woman." He handed it back, as if glad to be rid of it.

"You're sure ?"

The captain had no more interest in trying to recall, even if he could have.

"We carry many people, sir, trip after trip, and I cannot be expected to remember all their faces. I am only a man, after all."

"And strange," Downs repeated to Durand later, "are the ways of men; they see with their pulses and their blood. For the one whom I could only describe to him by word of mouth, and secondhand at that, he could recall instantly, and will go on recalling probably for the rest of his active life. But the one whose very photograph he had before him, he could not recall at all !"

Durand thumbed the pushbutton in their little cubbyhole, and after an in ordinate length of time, a shambling steward appeared.

"Not you," Durand told him. "Who takes care of the ladies' cabins?"

A stewardess appeared in dilatory turn. He gave her a coin.

"I want to ask you something. See if you can remember. Did you ever come to one of your ladies' cabins, of a morning, and find the bunk undisturbed, no one had been in it?"

She nodded readily. "Sho', lots times. We ain't full up every trip. Sometime' mo'n half my cabin' plumb empty."

"No, I'll have to ask it another way, then. Did you ever come to one of your ladies' cabins which had had someone in it first, and then find the bunk untouched ?"

It seemed to present difficulties to her. "You mean nobody slep' in it, but somebody done tuk it just the same?"

"That's it; that's about it."

She wasn't sure; she scratched and strove, but she wasn't sure.

He tried to help her. "With somebody's clothes in it, perhaps. With somebody's belongings there for you to see. Surely you could tell by that. But no one had lain in the bunk."

She still wasn't sure.

He tried his trump card. "With a birdcage in it, perhaps."

She ignited into recollection, like tinder when the spark strikes it square. "Tha's right, tha's how it was! How you know that? Cab'n with a birdcage in it, and I didn't have to tech the bunk nohow--"

He nodded darkly. "No one had lain in it the night before."

She drew up short. "I di'n say that. The lady fix up her berth herseff befo' I get there; she kine of tidy that way, and used to doing things with her own han's 'thout waiting fo' nobody."

"Who told you that, how do you kn--?"

"She in there when I come in. The pretties' little lady I ever done see; blon' like an angel and li'l like a chile."

In the dining saloon, Durand saw, Downs had held back one of his plates even after he had finished with it. At the end of the meal, when all others but the two of them had left the single, long table, Downs called the waiter over and said to him simply: "Watch this. Watch me do this a minute."

Then he took out a pocket handkerchief, spread it flat on the table top. Into it he put a small scrap of lettuce that had decorated his plate as a garnish, folded the corners of the handkerchief over toward the center, like a magician about to cause something to disappear.

"Did you ever see anyone do that, at the end of a meal? Did you?"

"You mean fold up their napkin like-?"

"No, no." Downs had to reopen it to show him the lettuce, then start the process over. "Put a leaf of lettuce in first, to carry away. It's a handkerchief. Think of it as a smaller one, far smaller, a little wisp--"

The waiter nodded now. "I seen a lady do that, one trip. I wondered what she-- It wasn't meat or nothin', just a little old--"

Downs held up his finger in admonition. "Now listen carefully. Think well. How many times can you remember seeing her do that? After how many meals ?"

"Just once. On'y once. After on'y one meal. That was the on'y time I ever seen her, just at that one meal."

"I can't get the two of them together," Downs said to Durand under his breath afterward. "One ends before the other begins. But it happened sometime during the first night. At suppertime the waiter saw the real one filch a scrap of lettuce for her bird. At eight in the morning the stewardess found a blonde 'like an angel' had already made up her own bunk, in that cabin where the birdcage was."

The first stop, at eight the following morning, Durand found Downs already making his preparations for departure.

"You're getting off here?" he queried in surprise. "So soon? Already?"

Downs nodded. "That boat's first stop this time was the boat's first stop that time too. The same schedule is held to. She was already hours dead and hours in the water by this moment. To go on past here only carries me farther away at every turn of the paddles. Come, walk me to the landing plank."

"If she is anywhere," he said, lowering his voice as they went out on the misty early-morning deck together, "she is back there somewhere, along the stretch we have covered this past night. If she ever floats ashore--or has already, unrecognized or maybe even unseen--it will be back there somewhere. I will go back along the shoreline, hamlet by hamlet, yard by yard, inch by inch; on foot if necessary. First on this side, then on the opposite. And if she is not ashore already, I will wait until she comes ashore."

His face was that of a fanatic, with whom there is no reasoning.

"Back there she is, on the river bottom, in the great wide eddy below Cape Girardeau, and back there I will wait for her."

Durand's blood ran a little cold at the turn of speech.

Downs held out his hand.

"Good luck to you," Durand said, half frightened of the man now.

"And to you," Downs answered. "You will see me again some day, sooner or later. I can't say when, but you will surely see me again some day."

He went down the gangplank. Durand watched his head sink from sight. Then he turned away with an involuntary shiver, the last thing he had heard the other man say repeating itself strangely in his mind:

You will see me again some day. You will surely see me again some day.

30

The death of a man is a sad enough thing to watch, but he goes by himself, taking nothing else with him. The death of a house is a sadder thing by far to watch. For so much more goes with it.

On that last day, Durand moved slowly from room to room of the St. Louis Street house. It was already dying before his very eyes; the furniture dismantled, rugs stripped from its floor boards, curtains from its windows, closet doors left gapingly ajar with nothing behind them any more. Its skeleton was peering through. The skeleton that stays on after death, just as in a man's case.

And yet, he realized, he was not so much leaving this place as leaving a part of himself behind in a common grave with it. A part that he could never regain, never recall. He could never hope again as he'd once hoped here. There was nothing to hope for. He could never be as young again as he'd once been here, even though it was a youngness late in coming, at thirty-seven; late in coming and swift in going, just a few brief weeks. He could never love again-- not only not as he'd once loved here, but to any degree at all. And that is a form of death in itself. His broken dreams were lying all around; he could almost hear them crunch, like spilled sugar, each time he moved his foot.

He was standing in the doorway of what- had been their bedroom, looking across at the wallpaper. The wallpaper that had come from New York--"pink, but not too bright a pink, with small blue flowers, like forget-me-nots"--put up for a bride to see, a bride who had never lived to see it, nor lived even to be a bride.

He closed the door. For no particular reason, for there was nothing to be kept in there any longer. Perhaps the more quickly to shut the room from sight.

And as it closed, a voice seemed to speak through it for a moment, with sudden lifelike clarity in his ears:

"Who is it knocks? . . . Tell him he may."

Then was gone, stilled forever.

He went slowly down the stairs, his knees bending reluctantly over each step, as if they were rusted.

The front door was standing open, and there was a mule and two-wheeled cart out before it, piled high with the effluvia he had donated to Aunt Sarah. She went hurrying past from the back just then, a dented-in gilt birdcage swinging from one hand, a bulky mantel clock hugged in her other. Then, seeing him, and still incredulous of his largesse, she stopped short to ask for additional assurance.

"This too? This yere clock ?"

"I told you, everything," he answered impatiently. "Everything but the heavy pieces with four legs. Take it all! Get it out of my sight!"

"I'm sure going to have the grandest cabin in Shrevepo't when I gets back home there."

He looked at her grimly for a moment, but his grimness was not for her.

"That band's not playing today, I notice," he blurted out accusingly.

She understood the reference, remembered it with surprising immediacy.

"Hush, Mr. Lou. Anyone can make a mistake. That was the devil's music."

She went on out to the cart, where a gangling youth, a nephew by remote attribute, loitered in charge of the booty.

"Got everything you want now?" Durand called out after her. "Then I'll lock up."

"Yes sir! Yes sir! Couldn't ask for no more." And, apparently, secretly a little dubious, to the end, that Durand might yet change his mind and retract, added in a hasty aside: "Come on, boy! Get this mule started up. What you lingering for?" She clambered up beside him and the cart waddled off. "God bless you, Mr. Lou! God keep you safe!"

"It's a little late for that," thought Durand morosely.

He turned back to the hall for a moment, to retrieve his own hat from the pronged, high-backed rack where he had slung it. And as he detached it, something fell out sideward to the floor from behind it with a little clap. Something that must have been thrust out of sight behind there long ago, and forgotten.

He picked up the slender little stick, and withdrew it, and a little swath of bunched heliotrope came with it at the other end. Limp, bedraggled, but still giving a momentary splash of color to the denuded hall.

Her parasol.

He took it by both ends, and arched his knee to it, and splintered it explosively, not once but again and again, with an inordinate violence that its fragility didn't warrant. Then flung the wisps and splinters away from him with full arm's strength, as far as they would go.

"Get to hell, after your owner," he mumbled savagely. "She's waiting for you to shade her there!"

And slammed the door.

The house was dead. Love was dead. The story was through.

31

May again. May that keeps coming around, May that never gets any older, May that's just as fair each time. Men grow old and lose their loves, and have no further hope of any new love, but May keeps coming back again. There are always others waiting for it, whose turn is still to come.

May again. May of '81 now. A year since the marriage.

The train from New Orleans came into Biloxi late in the afternoon. The sky was porcelain fresh from the kiln; a little wisp of steam seeping from it here and there, those were clouds. The tree tops were shimmering with delicate new leaf. And in the distance, like a deposit of sapphires, the waters of the Gulf. It was a lovely place to come to, a lovely sight to behold. And he was old and bitter now, too old to care.

He was the last one down from the steps of the railroad coach. He climbed down leadenly, grudgingly, as though it were all one to him whether he alighted here or continued on to the next place. It was. To rest, to forget awhile, that was all he wanted. To let the healing process continue, the scars harden into their ugly crust. New Orleans still reminded him too much. It always would.

A romantic takes his losses hard, and he was a romantic. Only a romantic could have played the role he had, played the fool so letterperfect. He was one of those men who are born to be the natural prey of women, he was beginning to realize it himself by now; if it hadn't been she, it would have been someone else. If it hadn't been a bad woman, then it would have been what they called a "good" woman. Even one of those would have had him in her power in no time at all. And though the results might have been less catastrophic, that was no consolation to his own innermost pride. His only defense was to stay away from them.

Now that the horse was stolen, the lock was on the stable door. The lock was on, and the key was thrown away, for good and all. But there was nothing it opened to any more.

Amidst all the bustle of holidaymakers down here from the hinterland for a week or two's sojourn, the prattle, the commotion as they formed into little groups, joining with the friends who had come to train side to meet them, he stood there solitary, apart, his bag at his feet.

The eyes of more than one marriageable young damsel in the groups near by were cast speculatively toward him over the shoulder of some relative or friend, probably wondering if he were eligible to be sketched into plans for the immediate future, for what is a holiday without a lot of beaux? Yet whenever they happened to meet his own eyes they hurriedly withdrew again, and not wholly for the sake of seemliness either. It left them with a rather disconcerting sensation, like looking at something you think to be alive and finding out it is inanimate after all. It was like flirting with a fence post or water pump until you found out your mistake.

The platform slowly cleared, and he still stood there. The train from New Orleans started on again, and he half turned, as if to reenter and ride on with it to wherever the next place was. But he faced forward again and let the cars go ticking off behind his back, on their way down the track.

32

He soon fell into the habit of dropping into the bar of one of the adjacent hotels, the Belleview House, at or around seven each evening for a slowly drunk whiskey punch. Or at most two of them, never more; for it wasn't the liquor that attracted him, but the lack of anything to do until it was time for the evening meal. He chose this particular place because his own hotel had no such establishment, and it was the nearest at hand and the largest of those that had.

It was a cheery, bustling, buzzing place, this, characteristic of its kind and of the period. A gentleman's drinking place. And like all others of its nature, while it was strictly a male preserve, women were never so pervasively present in thought, spirit, implication and conversation, as here where they were physically absent. They permeated the air; they were in every double entendre, and wink, and toast, and bragging innuendo. And here they were as men wishfully wanted them to be, and as they so seldom were beyond these portals: uncommonly accommodating. At all times and in every reminiscence.

Even in allegory they presided. Upon the wall facing the horseshoeshaped mahogany counter, cheery lights blinking at either side of it--like glass-belied altar lights at the shrine of woman incarnate-- extended a tremendous oil painting of a reclining feminine form, presumably a goddess. Attended at its head by two winged cupids flying in rotary course, at its feet a cornucopia spilling fruits and flowers. Purple drapery was present, but more in discard than in application; one skein straggling downward across the figure's shoulder, another wisp stretching across its middle. In the background, and never noted by an onlooker since the canvas had first been hung, was an azure sky with puffballs of cottony clouds.

Dominating the place as it did, and shrewdly intended to, it was as a matter of fact the means of Durand's striking up his first acquaintanceship since arriving in Biloxi. The man nearest to him, on the occasion of his second successive visit to the place, alone as he was, was standing there with his eyes raptly fixed on it, and almost humid with a sort of silly, faraway greediness, when Durand happened to idly glance that way and catch the expression.

Durand couldn't resist smiling slightly, but to himself and not the devotee; but the other man, catching the half-formed smile just as it was about to turn away, mistook it for one of esoteric kinship of thought, and promptly returned it, but with an increment of friendly gregariousness that had been lacking in the original.

"Bless 'em!" he remarked fervently, and hoisted his glass toward the composition for Durand to see.

Durand nodded in temperate accord.

Emboldened, the other man raised his voice and invited over the three or four yards that separated them: "Will you join me, sir?"

Durand had no desire to, but to have refused would have been unwarrantedly boorish, so he moved accommodatingly toward his neighbor, and the latter made up the difference from his side.

Their orders were renewed, they saluted one another with them, and swallowed: thus completing the preliminary little ritual.

The other man was in his mid-forties, as far as Durand could judge. He had a good-looking, but rather weak and dissipated face; lines of looseness, rather than age, printed on it, particularly across the forehead. His complexion was extremely pallid; his hair dark, but possibly kept so with the aid of a little shoeblacking here and there; this, however, could only be a matter of conjecture. He was of lesser height than Durand, but of greater girth, albeit in a pillowy, less compact way.

"You alone here, sir?" he demanded.

"Quite alone," Durand answered.

"Shame!" he said explosively. "First time here, then, I take it ?"

It was, Durand admitted laconically.

"You'll like it, soon as you get to know the ropes," he promised. "Takes a man a few days, I don't care where it is."

It did, Durand agreed tepidly.

"You stopping at this hotel here ?" He cast his thumb joint toward the inner doors leading into the building itself. "I am."

"No, I'm over at the Rogers."

"Should have come to this one. Best one in the place. Kind of slow over there where you are, isn't it ?"

He hadn't noticed, Durand said. He didn't expect to remain for very long, anyway.

"Well, maybe you'll change your mind," the Other suggested breezily. "Maybe we can get you to change your mind about that," he added, as though vested with a proprietary interest in the resort.

"Maybe," Durand assented, without overmuch enthusiasm. "Now join me," he invited dutifully, noting that his companion's drink was near bottom.

"Honored," said the other man zestfully, making quick to complete its disappearance.

Just as Durand was about to give the order, one of the hotel page boys came through the blown-glass doors leading from the hotel proper, looked about for a moment, then, marking Durand's partner, came up to him, excused himself, and said a word in his ear which Durand failed to catch. Particularly since he did not try to.

"Oh, already?" the other man said. "Glad you told me," and handed the boy a coin. "Be right there."

He turned back to Durand. "I'm called," he said cheerfully. "We'll have to resume this where we left off, some other evening." He preened himself, touching at his tie, his hair, the fit of his coat shoulders. "Mustn't keep a lady waiting, you know," he added, unable to resist letting Durand know of what nature the summons was.

"By no means," Durand conceded.

"Good evening to you, sir."

"Good evening."

He watched him go. His face was anything but leisurely, even while still in full sight, and at the end he flung apart the doors quite violently, so anxious was he not to be delinquent.

Durand smiled a little to himself, half contemptuously, half in pity, and went back to his drink alone.

33

The following evening they met again, he and the other man. The other was already there when Durand entered from the street, so Durand joined him without ceremony, since the etiquette of the bar prescribed that he owed the other a drink, and to have shunned him--as he would have preferred to do--might have seemed on his part an attempt to avoid the obligation.

"Still alone, I see," he greeted Durand.

"Still," Durand said cryptically.

"Well, man, you're slow," he observed critically. "What's hindering you? I should think by this time you'd have any number of--" He didn't complete the phrase, but allowed a soggy wink to do so for him.

Durand smiled wanly and gave their order.

They saluted, they swallowed.

"By the way, let me introduce myself," the other said heartily. "I'm Colonel Harry Worth, late of the Army." The way he said it showed which army he meant; or rather that there was only one to be meant.

"I'm Louis Durand," Durand said.

They gripped hands, at the other's initiative.

"Where you from, Durand?"

"New Orleans."

"Oh," nodded the colonel approvingly. "Good place. I've been there some."

Durand didn't ask where he was from. He didn't, his own train of thoughts phrased it to himself, give a damn.

They talked of this and that. Of business conditions (together). Of a little girl in Natchez (the colonel). Of the current administration (together, and with bitterness, as if it were some sort of foreign yoke). Of a little girl in Louisville (the colonel). Of recipes oT drinks (together). Of horses, and their breeding and their racing (together). Of a "yellow" girl in Memphis (the colonel, with a resounding slap against his own thigh).

Then just as Worth was about to reorder, again the page came in, accosted him, said that word into his ear.

"Time's up," he said to Durand. He offered him his hand. "A pleasure, Mr. Randall. Be looking forward to the next time."

"Durand," Durand said.

The colonel recoiled with dramatic exaggeration, apologized profusely. "That's right; forgive me. There I go again. Got the worstall head for names."

"No harm," said Durand indifferently. He had an idea the mistake would continue to repeat itself for as long as their acquaintanceship lasted; a name that is not got right the second time, is not likely to be got right the fourth or the tenth time either. But it mattered to him not the slightest whether this man miscalled him or not, for the man himself mattered even less.

Worth renewed their handclasp, this time under the authentic auspices. Then as he turned to go, he reached downward to the counter, popped a clove into his mouth.

"That's just in case," he said roguishly.

He left rearward, into the hotel. Durand, was standing near the outside of the café, toward the street. Several minutes later, turning his head disinterestedly, he was just in time to catch the colonel's passage across the thick, soapy greenish plate glass that fronted the place and bulged convexly somewhat like a bay window.

The thickness of the medium they passed through blurred his outlines somewhat, but Durand could tell it was he. On the far side of him three detached excrescences, over and above those pertaining to his own person, were all that revealed he was escorting a woman. At the height of his shoulder blades the tip of a glycerined feather projected, from a hidden woman's bonnet on the outside, as though a quill or bright-tipped dart were sticking into him.

Then at the small of his back, and extending far beyond his own modest contours, a bustle fluctuated both voluptuously and yet somehow genteelly, ballooning along as its hidden wearer walked at his side. And lastly, down at his heels, as though one of the colonel's socks had loosened and were dragging, a small triangular wedge of skirt hem, an evening train, fluttered along the ground, switching erratically from side to side as it went.

But Durand didn't even allow his tepid glance to linger, to follow them long enough until they had drawn away into perspective sufficient to separate into two persons, instead of the one composite one, superimposed, they now formed.

Again he gave that wearied smile as on the night before. This time his brows went up, much as to say: Each man to his taste..

34

The page was later tonight in putting in an appearance. The colonel, therefore, had had one drink more than on their former evenings. This showed itself only in the added warmth of his friendliness, and in a tendency to clap and grip Durand on the upper arm at frequent intervals, in punctuation of almost every second remark he made. Otherwise Worth's speech was clear enough and his train of thought coherent enough.

"My fiancée is a lovely girl, Randall, a lovely girl," he reiterated solemnly, as though unable to impress it sufficiently upon his hearer.

"I'm sure she is," Durand said, as he had twice already. "I'm sure." Having corrected the mistake in nomenclature once for the evening, he no longer took the trouble after that, let Worth have his way about it.

"I tell you, I'm the luckiest man. But you should see her. You don't have to believe me; you should just see her for yourself."

"Oh, I do believe you," Durand protested demurely.

"You should have a girl like that" (clap). "You should get yourself a girl like that" (clap, clap).

"We can't all be as lucky," Durand murmured, stropping the edge of one foot restlessly along the brass bar rail.

"Hate to see a fine figure of a man like you mooning around alone" (dap).

"I'm not complaining," Durand said, scouring the bottom of his glass disclaimingly around on the bar-top in interlocked circles, until he had brought it back again around to where it had started from.

"But, dammit, look at me. I have you bettered by ten years, I vow. I don't stand around waiting for them to come to me. You'll never get anyone that way. You have to go out and find one."

"That's right, you do," agreed Durand, with the air of a man pledging to himself: I'll keep up my end of this conversation if it kills me.

The colonel was suddenly assailed by belated misgivings of having transgressed good taste. This time he pinioned Durand fondly by the coat revere, in lieu of a clap. "I'm not being too personal, am I?" he besought. "If I am, just say so, and I'll back out. Wouldn't want you to think that for the world."

"No offense whatever," Durand assured him. Which was literally true. It was like discussing astrology or some other remote subject.

"Reason I take such an interest in you is, I like you. I find your company most enjoyable."

"I can reciprocate the feeling," said Durand gravely, with a brief inclination that seemed to be exerted by the top of his head alone.

"I'd like to have you meet my fiancée. There's a girl."

"I'd be honored," said Durand. He was beginning to wish the nightly page boy would put in an appearance.

"She'll be coming down in a minute or two for me to pick her up." The colonel was suddenly visited with an inspiration. Pride of possession very frequently being synonymous with pride of display. "Why don't you join us for tonight? Love to have you. Come on out with me and I'll introduce you."

"Not tonight," said Durand a little hastily. Grasping at any excuse he could find, he stroked his own jaw line tentatively. "I wasn't expecting-- Afraid I'm not presentable."

The colonel cocked his head critically. "Nonsense. You look all right. You're clean shaven."

He bethought himself of a compromise. "Well, just step out the door with me a moment and let me have you meet her, as she comes down. Then we'll go on alone."

Durand was suddenly visited by scruples of delicacy, which came in handy to his purpose. "I don't think she'd thank you for bringing anyone straight out of here to be presented to her face to face. It mightn't look right; you know how the ladies are. After all, this is a men's drinking café."

"But I come in here every night myself," the colonel said uncertainly.

"But you know her; I'm a stranger to her. It's not the same thing."

Before Worth could make up his mind on this fine point of social etiquette, the habitual bellboy had come in and delivered his summons.

"Your lady's down, sir."

The colonel put a coin in his gloved hand, drained his drink.

"Tell you what. I have a better idea. Suppose we make it a foursome. I'll have my fiancée bring someone along for you. She must know some of the unattached young ladies around here by now. That'll make it more comfortable for you. How about tomorrow night? Nothing on for then, have you ?"

"Not a thing," said Durand, satisfied with having gained his reprieve for the present at least, and toying with the thought of sending his excuses sometime during the course of the following day as the best way of getting out of it. Any further reluctance at the moment, he realized, would have veered over into offense, even where such a thick-skinned individual as Worth was concerned, and it was none of his intent to offend the man gratuitously.

"Fine!" said Worth, beaming. "That's an engagement, then. I'll tell you what's just the place for it. There's a little supper establishment called The Grotto. Open late. Not fast, you understand. Just good and lively. They have music there, and very good wine. We go there often, Miss Castle and I. Instead of meeting here at the hotel, where there are a lot of old fogies around ready to gossip, you join us there. I'll bring the two young ladies with me."

"Excellent," said Durand.

The colonel rubbed his hands together gleefully, evidently former facets of his life not having yet died out as completely as he himself might have wished to believe.

"I'll engage a private alcove. They have them there, curtained off from prying eyes. Look for us, you'll find us in one of them." He tapped Durand on the chest with his index finger. "And don't forget, the invitation's mine."

"I dispute you there," Durand said.

"We'll quarrel over that when the time comes. Tomorrow night, then. Understood ?"

"Tomorrow night. Understood."

Worth went hurrying toward the page who stood waiting for him just within the doors, evidently having received literal instructions to bring him with him, on the part of one who knew the colonel well.

Suddenly he turned, came hastening back, rose on tiptoe, and whispered hoarsely into Durand's ear: "I forgot to ask you. Blonde or brunette ?"

Her image crossed Durand's mind for a minute. "Brunette," he said succinctly, and a flicker of pain crinkled his eyes momentarily.

The colonel dug an elbow into his ribs with ribald camaraderie.

35

Somehow, the next day, he was too lackadaisical about the engage.. ment even to send his perfunctory regrets in time, and so before he knew it, it was evening, the appointment had become confirmed if only by default, and it was too late to extricate himself from it without being guilty of the grossest rudeness, which would not have been the case had he canceled it a few hours earlier.

He'd lain down on his bed, fully dressed, late in the afternoon for a short nap, and when he awoke the time set was already imminent, and there was nothing left to do now but fulfill the engagement.

He sighed and grimaced privately to his mirror, but then commenced the necessary preparations nonetheless, stirring his brush vigorously within his thick crockery mug until foam swelled up and beaded driblets of it ran down the sides. He could remain a half-hour, he promised himself, as a token of participation, then arrange to have himself called away by one of the waiters with a decoy message, and leave. Making sure to pay his share of the entertainment before he did, so they wouldn't think that the motive. They would be offended, he supposed, but less than if he were not to appear at all.

Fortified by this intention, shaved and cleanly shirted, he shrugged on his coat, thumbed open his money-fold to see that it was sufficiently well filled, and glumly set forth. No celebrant ever started out with poorer grace or longer face to join what was meant to be a pleasure party. He was swearing softly under his breath as he closed the door of his room behind him: at the overgregarious colonel for inveigling him into this; at the unknown he was expected to pay Court to for the mere fact that she was a woman and so could force him into a position where he was obliged to; and at himself, first and foremost, for not having had the bluntness to refuse point-blank the night before when the invitation had first been put to him.

Some vapid, simpering heifer; everyone's leavings. He could imagine the colonel's taste in women, judging by the man himself.

A ten-minute walk, in this caustic frame of mind, and unmellowed to the very end by the spangled brocade of starred sky hanging over him, had brought him to his destination.

The Grotto was a long, narrow., cabinlike, single-story structure, flimsy and unprepossessing on the outside like many another ephemeral holiday resort catering-place. Gas and oil light rayed forth from every crack and seam of it, tinted rose and blue by some peculiarity of shading on the inside. The interior, due to some depression in the ground, was somewhat lower than the walks outside, so that he had to descend a short flight of entry steps once he had been bowed in by the colored door-flunkey. The main dining room itself, seen from their top, was a disordered litter of white-clothed table Xops, heads studding them in circular formation, and each one set with a rose or blue-shaded table lamp, an innovation borrowed from Europe, which dimmed the glare, usual in such places, to a twilight softness and created a suggestion of illicit revelry and clandestine romance. It gave the.place the appearance of a field of blinking fireflies.

A pompous dining steward, with wide-spreading frizzed sideburns, clasping a bill-of-fare slantwise like a painter holding a palette, greeted him at the foot of the stairs.

"Are you alone, sir? May I show you to a table?"

"No, I was to join a party," Durand said. "Colonel Worth and friends. In one of the private booths. Which way are they?"

"Oh, straight to the back, sir. At the far end of the room. You are expected. They are in the first one on the right."

He made his way down the long central lane of clearance to the rear, like someone wresting his way through a brawl, auditory and olfactory, if not combative. Through cellular entities or zones of disparate food odors, that remained isolated, each in its little nucleus, refusing to mingle; now lobster, now charcoaled steak, now soggy linen and spilled wine. Through dismembered snatches of conversation and laughter that likewise remained compartmentalized, each within its own little circular area.

"When he's with me he says one thing, and when he's with the next girl he says another. Oh, I've heard all about you, never you mind !"

"--an administration that's the ruination of this country! And I don't care who hears me, I'm entitled to my opinion!"

"--and now I come to the best part of the story. This is the part that will delight you--"

At the back, the room narrowed to a single serving passage leading to the kitchen. Lining each side of this, however, were openings leading into the little private alcoves or dining nooks Worth had mentioned. All alike discreetly curtained-off from view, although otherwise they were doorless. The nearest one on either side, however, was not strictly parallel to the passage but placed slantwise to it, cutting off the corner.

As he fixed his eyes upon the one to the right, marking that for his eventual destination, though still a little distance short of it, with the last bank of tables projecting somewhat between, the protective curtain gashed back at one side and a waiter came out backward, in the act of withdrawal but lingering a moment half-in halfout to allow the completion of some instruction being given him. He held the curtain, for that moment, away from the wall in a sort of diamond-shaped aperture, with one hand.

Durand's foot, striking ground, never moved on again, never took him a space nearer.

It was as if a cameo of purest line, of clearest design, were in that opening, held there for Durand to see, a cameo of dazzling clarity, presented against a dark velvet mounting.

On one side, fluctuating with utterance of orders to the waiter, was a slice of the lumpy profile of the colonel. At the other, facing back toward him, was a slice of the smooth-turned profile of an unknown, dark of hair and dark of eye.

Midway between the two, facing outward, bust-length, white as alabaster, dazzling as marble, regal as a diminutive Juno, beautiful as a blonde Venus or the Helen of the Trojans, were the face and throat and bared shoulders and half-bared bosom that he would never forget, that he could never forget, brought as if by magic transmutation back from out his dreams into the living substance again.

Julia.

He could even see the light on her hair, in moving golden sheen. Even see the passing glint, as of crystal, as her eyes moved.

Julia, the killer. The destroyer of his heart.

That she failed to see him out there was incredible. All but the pupils of her eyes alone were bearing straight toward him. They must have been deflected, unnoticeable at that distance, toward one or the other of her table companions, to miss striking him.

The waiter dropped his restraining hand, the curtainside swept to the wall, the cameo was blotted out.

He stood there as stunned, as blasted, as robbed of his powers of motion, as though that white, searing glimpse--there, then gone again--had been a flash of lightning which had struck too close and fused him to the ground. All its effects lacked was to cause him to fall flat in front of everybody, then and there.

Then a waiter, hurrying obliviously by, jarred against him, and that set him into motion at last; as one ball strikes another on a billiard table, starting it off.

He was going back the other way, the way he'd come, now, unsteadily, jostling into tables and the backs of chairs that lined his route, past momentarily upturned, questioning faces, past a blurred succession of table lamps like worthless beacons that only confused and failed to guide him straight through their midst.

He reached the other end of the raucous place, and the same steward as before came solicitously to his side.

"Did you fail to find your party, sir?"

"I--I've changed my mind." He took out his money-fold, crushed an incredible ten-dollar bill into the man's hand. "I haven't been here asking for them. You didn't see me."

He stumbled up the steps and out, lurching as though he'd filled himself with wine in those few minutes. Wine of hate, ferment of the grapes of wrath.

36

He had at first no very clear concept of what he meant to do. The black fog of hate that filled his mind clouded all plans and purposes. Instinct alone had kept him from rushing in through those curtains, not calculation.

Alone. Alone he must have her, where no onlookers could save her. He wanted no hot-mouthed denunciation, quickly over. What was one more denunciation to her? Her path must have been strewn with them already. He wanted no public wrangle, in which her coolness and composure would inevitably have the better of him. "I've never seen this man before. He must be mad!" One thing and one alone he wanted, one thing alone he'd have. He wanted her death. He wanted the few moments just ahead of it to be between the two of them alone.

He stood for a while outside their hotel, hers and Worth's, to calm himself, to compose himself. Stood with his back to it, looking out to seaward. And as he stood, motionless, inscrutable of attitude in all else, over and over and over again he brought his hand down upon the wooden railing. At stated intervals, like a pestle, pulverizing his intentions, grinding them fine.

Then it slackened, then it stopped. He was ready.

He turned abruptly and went into the brightly lighted lobby of the place, purposefully yet not too hurriedly. He went undeviatingly toward the desk, stopped before it, drummed his fingernails upon its white-veined black marble top to hasten the clerk's attention.

Then when he had it: "I'm a friend of Colonel Worth's. I've just left him and his party at the Grotto."

"Yes, sir. Can I be of service?"

"One of the young ladies with us--I believe she's stopping here-- found the evening chillier than she expected it to be. She's sent me back for her scarf. She explained to me where it's to be found. May I be allowed to go up and fetch it for her?"

The clerk was professionally cautious. "Could you describe her to me?"

"She's blonde, and a rather small little person."

The clerk's doubts vanished. "Oh, that's the colonel's fiancée. Miss Castle. In Room Two-six. I'll have a bellboy take you up immediately, sir."

He jarred a bell, handed over a key with the requisite instructions.

Durand was taken up to the second floor, in a ponderous latticework elevator, its shaft transparent on all sides. He noted that a staircase coiled around this on the outside, rising as it rose, attaining the same destination at last. He noted that, well and grimly.

They went down a hall. There was a brief delay as the bellboy fitted key to door and tried it. Then as the door opened, the most curious sensation that he had ever had swept over Durand. It was as though he were near her all over again. It was as though she had just this moment stepped out of the room on the far side as he entered it on the near. She was present to every faculty but vision. Her perfume still lay ghostly on the air. He could feel her at the ends of all his pores. A discarded taffeta garment flung over the back of a chair rustled again as she moved, in memory, in his ears.

It whipped his hate so, it steeled him to his purpose. He made no false step, wasted not a move. He went about it as one stalks an enemy.

The bellboy had remained deferentially beside the open door, allowing him to enter alone. He remained, however, in a position from which he could watch what Durand was about.

"She must be mistaken," Durand said plausibly, for the other's benefit but as if speaking to himself. "I don't see it over the chair." He raised the taffeta underslip, replaced it again. "It must be in one of these bureau drawers." He opened one, closed it again. Then a second.

The bellboy was watching him now with the slightly anxious air of a hen having its nest searched for eggs.

"Women never know where they leave things, did you ever notice ?" Durand said to him in man-to-man confidence.

The boy grinned, flattered at being included into a stage of experience which he had not yet reached of his own efforts.

Durand, secretly desperate, at length discovered something in the third drawer, withdrew a length of flimsy heliotrope voile, sufficient at least for the purposes of his visit if nothing else.

"This, I guess," he said, concealing a relieved smile at his good fortune.

He closed the drawer, came back toward the door, stuffing it into his side pocket.

The boy's eyes, inevitably, were on his prodding hand. His were on the edge of the door, turned inward so that it faced him. It had, above the latch-tongue, a small rounded depression. A plunger, controlling the lock. Just as his own room door, in the other building, had. He had counted on that.

Before the boy was aware of it, Durand had relieved him of the duty of reclosing the door; grasping it by its edge, not its knob, directly over the plunger, and drawing it closed after the two of them.

He had, while doing so, changed the plunger, pressing it in, leaving the door off-lock and simply on-latch no matter whether a key was used or not.

He then allowed the boy to complete his appointed task of turning the key, extracting it and once that was done, distracted him from testing it further by having a silver half-dollar extended in his hand for him.

They went down together, the boy all smiles and congenitally unable to harbor suspicion of anyone who tipped so lavishly. Durand smiling a little too, a very little.

He nodded his thanks to the clerk as he went by, tapped his pocket to show him that he had secured what he'd come for.

There wasn't a glint of pity in the stars over him as he came out into the open night and his face dimmed to its secretive shade. There wasn't a breath of tenderness in the humid salt breeze that came in from the Gulf. He'd have her alone, and no one should save her. He'd have her death, and nothing else would do.

37

He went from there to his own room, unlocked his traveling bag, and took out the pistol. The same pistol that one night in New Orleans he'd told Aunt Sarah he would kill her with. And now, it seemed, the time was near, was very near. He cracked it open, though he knew already it was fully charged; and found that it was. Then he sheathed it in the inside pocket of his coat, which was deep and took it up to the turn of the butt and held it securely.

He looked down and noted the heliotrope scarf dangling from his side pocket, and in a sudden access of hate he ripped it out and flung it on the floor. Then he ground his heel into the middle of it, and kicked it away from him, like something unclean, unfit to touch. His face was putrefied with the hate that reeks from an unburied love.

He tweaked out the gaslight, and the greenish-yellow cast of the room turned to moonlight tarnished with lampblack. He stood there in it for a moment, half-man, half-shadow, as if gathering purpose. Then he moved, the half of him that was man became shadow, the half that was shadow became man, as the window beams rippled at his passage. There was a flicker of citron from the lighted hall outside, as he opened the door, closed it after him.

He went up the stairs to the second floor without meeting anybody, and the hubbub of voices from the several public parlors on the main floor grew fainter the farther he ascended. Until at last there was silence. He quitted the staircase at the second, and followed the corridor along which the page had led him before, with its flower-scrolled red carpeting and walnut-dark doors. Here for the first time he nearly met mischance. A lady coming out of her room caught him midway along it, too far advanced to turn hack. Her eyes rested on him for an instant only, then she passed him with discreetly downcast gaze, as befitted their distinction of gender, and the rustle of her multi-layered skirts sighed its way along the passage. He gave her time to turn and pass from sight at the far end, stopping for a moment opposite a door that was not his destination, as if about to go in there. Then swiftly going on and making for the door he had in mind, he cast a quick precautionary look about him, seized the knob, gave it a rapid turn, and was in. He closed it after him.

There were the same low night lights burning as before, and she wasn't back yet. Her presence was in the air, he thought, in faded sachet and in the warm, quilted voluptuousness the closedfor-hours room breathed. He couldn't have come any nearer to her than this; only her person itself was absent. Her aura was in here with him, and seeming to twine ghost-arms about his neck from behind. He squared his shoulders, as if to free them, and twisted his neck within his collar.

He stood at the window for a while, safely slantwise out of sight, staring ugly-faced at the moonlight, his face pitted like a smallpox victim's by the pores of the lacework curtain. Below him there was the sloping white shed of the veranda roof, like a tilted snowbank. Beyond that, the smooth black lawns of the hotel grounds. And off in the distance, coruscating like a swarm of fireflies, the waters of the inlet. Overhead the moon was round and hard as a medicinal lozenge. And, to him, as unpalatable.

Turning away abruptly at last, he retired deeper into the room, and selecting a chair at random, sank into it to wait. Shadow, the way he happened to be sitting, covered the upper part of his face, running across it in an even line, like a mask. A mask inscrutable and grim and without compunction.

He waited from then on without a move, and the night seemed to wait with him, like an abetting conspirator eager to see ill done.

Once toward the end he took out his watch and looked at it, dipping its face out into the moonlight. Nearly a quarter after twelve. He had been in here three full hours. They'd stayed the evening out without him at the supper pavilion. He clapped the watch closed, and it resounded bombastically there in the stillness.

Suddenly, as if in derisive answer, he heard her laugh, somewhere far in the distance. Perhaps coming up in the lift. He would have known it for hers even if he hadn't seen her in the alcove at the restaurant earlier tonight. He would, he felt sure, have known it for hers even if he hadn't known she was here in Biloxi at all. The heart remembers.

38

He jumped up quickly and looked around. Strangely enough, for all the length of time he'd been in the room, he'd made no plans for concealment, he had to improvise them now. He saw the screen there, and chose that. It was the quickest and most obvious method of effacing himself, and she was already nearing the door, for he could hear her voice now, merrily saying something, close at hand in the hallway.

He spread the screen a little more, squaring its panels, so that it made a sort of hollow pilaster protruding from the wall, and got in behind there. He could maintain his own height, he found, and still not risk having the top of his head show. He could see through the perforated, lacelike, scrolled woodwork at the top, his eyes came up to there.

The door opened, and she had arrived.

Two figures came in, not one; and advancing only a step or two beyond the doorway, almost instantly blended into one, stood there locked in ravenous embrace in the semishadow of the little foyer. A gossamer piquancy of breath-borne champagne or brandy reached him, admixed with a little perfume. His heart drowned in it.

There was no motion, just the rustle of pressed garments.

Again her laugh sounded, but muffled, furtive, now; lower now that it was close at hand than it had been when at a distance outside.

He recognized the colonel's voice, in a thick whisper. "I've been waiting for this all evening. My li'l girl, you are, my li'l girl."

The rustling strengthened to active resistance.

"Harry, that's enough now. I must wear this dress again. Leave me at least a shred of it."

"I'll buy you another. I'll buy you ten."

She broke away at last, light from the hallway came between their figures; but the embrace was still locked about her like a barrelhoop. Durand could see her pushing the colonel's arms perpendicularly downward, unable to pry them open in the usual direction. At last they severed.

"But I like this one. Don't be so destructive. I never saw such a man. Let me put the lights up. We mustn't stand here like this."

"I like it better as it is."

"I've no doubt!" she said pertly. "But up they go just the same."

She entered the room itself now, and went to the night light, and it flared from a spark to a sunburst at her touch. And as the light bathed her, washing away all indistinctness of outline and of feature, she glowed there before him in full life once more, after a year and a month and a day. No longer just a cameo glimpsed through a parted curtain, a disembodied laugh down a hallway, a silhouette against an open door; she was whole, she was real, she was she. She broke into bloom. In all her glory and her ignominy; in all her beauty and all her treachery; in all her preciousness and all her worthlessness.

And an old wound in Durand's heart opened and began to bleed all over again.

She threw down her fan, she threw down her shoulder scarf; she drew off the one glove she had retained and added that to the one she had carried loose, and threw them both down. She was in garnet satin, stiff and crisp as starch, and picked with scrolls and traceries of twinkling jet. She took up a little powder-pad and touched it to the tip of her nose, but in habit rather than in actual application. And her courtier stood there and watched her every move, idolizing her, beseeching her, with his greedy smoking eyes.

She turned to him at last, offhandedly, over one shoulder. "Wasn't it too bad about poor Florrie? What do you suppose became of the young man you arranged to have her meet?"

"Oh, blast him!" Worth said truculently. "Forgot, maybe. He's no gentleman. If I run into him again, I'll cut him dead."

She was seeing to her hair now. Touching it a bit, without disturbing it too much. Gracefully crouching a trifle so that the top of the mirror frame could encompass it comfortably. "What was he like ?" she asked idly. "Did he seem well-to-do? Would we-would Florrie, I mean--have liked him, do you think ?"

"I hardly know him. Name was Randall or something. I've never seen him spend more than fifty cents at a time for a whiskey punch."

"Oh," she said on a dropping inflection, and stopped with her hair, as if losing interest in it.

She turned and moved toward him suddenly, hand extended in parting gesture. "Well, thank you for a congenial evening, Harry. Like all your evenings it was most delectable."

He took the hand but kept it within his two.

"Mayn't I stay just a little while longer? I'll behave. I'll just sit here and watch you."

"Watch me! "she exclaimed archly. "Watch me do what? Not what you'd like to, I warn you." She pushed him slightly, at the shoulder, to keep the distance between them even.

Then her smile faded, and she seemed to become thoughtful, ruefully sober for a moment.

"Wasn't it too bad about poor Florrie, though?" she repeated, as though discovering some remaining value in the remark that had not been fully extracted the first time.

"Yes, I suppose so," he agreed vaguely.

"She took such pains with her appearance. I had to lend her the money for the dress."

Instantly he released her. "Oh, here. Let me. Why didn't you tell me this sooner ?" He busied himself within his coat, took out his money-fold, opened and busied himself with that.

She darted a quick glance down at it, then the rest of the time, until he had finished, looked dreamily past him to the rear of the room.

He put something in her hand.

"Oh, and while I think of it--" he said.

He fumbled additionally with the pocketbook, put something further into her uncooperative, yet unresistant, hand.

"For the hotel bill," he said. "For the sake of appearance, it's better if you attend to it yourself."

She circled, swept her back toward him. Yet scarcely in offense or disdain, for she said to him teasingly: "Now don't look. At least, not over my left shoulder."

The folds of garnet satin swept up at her side for a moment, revealing the long shapely glint of smoky black silk. Worth, up on the toes of his feet to gain height, was peering hungrily over her right shoulder. She turned her face toward him for a moment, gave him a roguish look, winked one eye, and the folds of her dress cascaded to the floor again, with a soft little plop.

Worth made a sudden convulsive move, and they had blended into one again, this time in full light of mid-room, not in the shadow of the vestibule.

Durand felt something heavy in his hand. Looked down and saw that he'd taken the pistol out. "I' 11 kill both of them," stencilled itself in white-hot lettering across his mind.

"And now--?" Worth said, lips blurred against her neck and shoulder. "Are you going to be kind--?"

Durand could see her head avert itself from his; smiling benevolently, yet avert itself. She twisted to face the door, and in turning, managed to get him to turn likewise; then somehow succeeded in leading him toward it, her face and shoulders still caught in his endless kiss. "No--" she said temperately, at intervals. "No-- No-- I am kind to you, Harry. No more kind than I've always been to you, no less-- Now that's a good boy--"

Durand gave a sigh of relief, put the gun away.

She was standing just within the gap of the door now, alone at last, her arm extended to the outside. Worth must have been kissing it repeatedly, the length of time she maintained it that way.

All he could hear was a subdued murmur of reluctant parting.

She withdrew her arm with effort, pressed the door closed.

He saw her face clearly as she came back into the full light. All the playfulness, coquetry, were wiped off it as with a sponge. It was shrewd and calculating, and a trifle pinched, as if with the long wearing of a mask.

"God Almighty!" he heard her groan wearily, and saw her strike herself a glancing blow against the temple.

She went first and looked out the window, as he had earlier; stood there motionless by it some time. Then when she'd had her fill of whatever thoughts the sight from there had managed to instill in her, she turned away suddenly, almost with abrupt impatience, causing her skirts to swirl and hiss out in the silence. She came back to the dresser, fetched out a drawer. No powdering at her nose, no primping at her hair, now. She had no look to spare for the mirror.

She withdrew the money from her stocking-top and flung it in, with a turn of the wrist that was almost derisive. But not of the money itself, possibly; of its source.

Reaching into some hiding place she had in there, she took out one of those same slender cigars Aunt Sarah had showed him in the St. Louis Street house in New Orleans.

To him there was something repugnant, almost obscene, in the sight of her bending to the lamp chimney with it until it had kindled; holding it tight-bitten, smoke sluicing from her miniature nostrils, as from a man's.

In a sickening phantasmagoric illusion, that lasted but a moment, she appeared to him as a fuming, horned devil, in her ruddy longtailed dress.

She set the cigar down, presently, in a hairpin tray, and seated herself by the mirror. She unfastened her hair and it came tumbling down in a molasses-colored cascade to the small of her back. Then she opened a vent in her dress at the side, separating a number of hooks from their eyes, but without unfastening or removing it farther than that. Leaving a gap through which her tightly laced side swelled and subsided again at each breath.

She took out the money now she had cast in only a moment before, but took out far more than she had flung in, and counted it over with close attention. Then she put it into a small lacquered casket, of the type used to hold jewels, and locked that, and gave it a commending little thump on its lid with her knuckles, as if in pleased finality.

She reclosed the drawer, stood up, moved over to the desk, took down its lid and seated herself at it. She drew out a sheet of notepaper from the rack. Took up a pen and dipped it, and squaring her other arm above the surface to be written on, began to write.

Durand moved out from behind the screen and slowly walked across the carpet toward her. It gave his tread no sound, though he wasn't trying for silence. He advanced undetected, until he was standing behind her, and could look down over her shoulder.

"Dear Billy," the paper said. "I--"

The pen had stopped, and she was nibbling for a moment at its end.

He put out his hand and let it come lightly to rest on her shoulder. Left it there, but lightly, lightly, as she had once put her hand to his shoulder, lightly, on the quayside at New Orleans; lightly, but crushing his life.

Her fright was the fright of guilt, and not innocence. Even before she could have known who it was. For she didn't turn to look, as the innocent of heart would have. She held her head rigidly as it was, turned the other way, neck taut with suspense. She was afraid to look. There must have been such guilt strewn behind her in her life, that anyone's sudden touch, in the stillness of the night, in the solitude of her room, she must have known could bode no good.

Her one hand dropped the pen lifelessly. Her other clawed secretively at the sheet of notepaper, sucking it up, causing it to disappear. Then dropping it, crumpled, over the desk side.

Still she didn't move; the sleek taffy-colored head held still, like something an axe was about to fall on.

Her eyes had found him in the mirror by now. It was over to the left of her, and when he looked at it himself, he could see, in the reflection of her talcum-white face, the pupils darkening the far corners of her eyes, giving her an ugly unnatural appearance, as though she had black eyeballs.

"Don't be afraid to look around, Julia," he said ironically. "It's only me. No one important. Merely me."

Suddenly she turned, so swiftly that the transpiacement of the silken back of her head by the plaster-white cast of her face was almost like that of an apparition.

"You act as though you don't remember me," he said softly. "Surely you haven't forgotten me, Julia. Me of all people."

"How'd you know I was here?" she demanded granularly.

"I didn't. I was the other man who was to have met you at the restaurant party tonight."

"How'd you get in here?"

"Through the door."

She had risen now, defensively, and was trying to reverse the desk chair to get it between them, reedy as it was, but there was no room to allow for its insertion.

He took it from her and set it to rest with his hand.

"How is it you don't order me from your room, Julia? How is it you don't threaten to scream for help? Or all those other things they usually do ?"

She said, summoning up a sort of desperate tractability, that he couldn't help but admire for an instant, "This is a matter that has to be settled between us, without screams or ordering you from the room." She stroked one arm, shiveringly, all the way up to the top. "Let's get it over with as soon as we can."

"It's taken me better than a year," he said. "You won't grudge a few added minutes, I hope ?"

She didn't answer.

"Were you going to marry the colonel, Julia? That would have been bigamous."

She shrugged irritably. "Oh, he's just a fool. I'm not accountable for him. The whole world is full of fools." And in this phrase, at least, there was unmistakable sincerity.

"And the biggest of them all is the one you're looking at right now1 Julia."

He kicked the crumpled tossball of notepaper leniently with the toe of his foot, moving it a little. But gently, as if it held somebody else's wracked hopes.

"Who's Billy ?"

"Oh, no one in particular. A chance acquaintance. A fellow I met somewhere." She flung out her hand, still with nervous irritability, as if causing the person to disappear from her ken in that way.

"The world must be full of Billys for you. Billys and Lous and Colonel Worths."

"Is it ?" she said. "No, there was only one Lou. It may be a little late to say it now. But I didn't marry the Bfflys and the Colonel Worths. I married Lou."

"You acted it," he agreed mordantly.

"Well, it's late," she said. "What's the good now?"

"We agree on that, at least."

She went over to the lamp, and thoughtfully spanned her hand against it, so that her flesh glowed translucent brick-red, and watched that effect for a while. Then she turned toward him.

"What is it, Lou? What are your plans for me ?"

His hand rose slowly to that part of his coat which covered where the gun was resting against him. Remained there a moment. Then crept around to the inside and found it, by the handle. Then drew it out, so slowly, so slowly, the bone handle, the nickelled chambers and fluted barrel seemed never to stop coming, like something pulled on an endless train.

"I came here to kill you, Julia."

A single glance was all she gave it. Just enough to identify it, to see that he had the means to do it on his person. Then after that, her eyes were for his alone, never left them from then on. Knowing where the signal would lie: in his eyes and not on the gun. Knowing where the only place to appeal lay: in his eyes.

She looked at him for a long time, as if measuring his ability to do it: what he'd said. What she saw there, only she could have told. Whether full purpose, hopeless to deflect, or half-purpose, waiting only to be crumbled.

He didn't point it, he didn't raise it to her; he simply held it, on the flat side, muzzle offside. But his face was white with the long pain she'd given him, and whatever she'd read in his look, still all that was needed was a turn of his hand.

Perhaps she was a gambler, and instinctively liked the odds, they appealed to her, whetted her; she hated to bet on a sure thing. Or perhaps the reverse: she was no gambler, she only banked upon a certainty, never anything else, in men or in cards; and this was a certainty now, though he didn't know it himself yet. Or perhaps, again it was solely vanity, self-esteem, that prompted her, and she must put her power over him to the test, even though to lose meant to die. Perhaps, even, if she were to lose, she would want to die, vanity being the thing it is.

She smiled at him. But in brittle challenge, not in anything else.

She suddenly wrenched at the shoulder of her dress, tore it down. Then pulled at it, farther down and still farther down, withdrawing her arm from the bedraggled loop it now made, until at last the whiteness of her side was revealed all but to the waist. On the left, the side of the heart. Moving toward him all the while, closer step by step. White as milk and pliable as China silk, flesh flexing as she walked.

Then halted as the cold gun touched her, holding her ravaged dress-bodice clear and looked deep into his eyes.

"All right, Lou," she whispered.

He withdrew the gun from between them.

She came a step closer with its removal.

"Don't hesitate, Lou," she breathed. "I'm waiting."

His heel edged backward, carrying him a hair's breadth off. He stuffed the gun into his side pocket, to be rid of it, hastily, fumblingly, careless how he did so, leaving the hilt projecting.

"Cover yourself up, Julia," he said. "You're all exposed."

And there was the answer. If she'd been a gambler, she'd won. If she'd been no gambler, she'd read his eyes right the first time. If it was vanity that had led her to the brink of destruction, it had triumphed, it was intact, undamaged.

She gave no sign. Not even of having triumphed; which is the way of the triumphant when they are clever as well. His face was bedewed with accumulated moisture, as though it were he who had taken the risk.

She drew her clothes upward again, never to where they had originally been but at least in partial restoration.

"Then if you won't kill me, what do you want of me?"

"To take you back to New Orleans and hand you over to the police." As if uneasy at their close confrontation, he sundered it, shifted aside. "Get yourself ready," he said over his shoulder.

Suddenly his head inclined, to stare downward at his own chest, as if in involuntary astonishment. Her arms had crept downward past his shoulders, soft as white ribbons, and were trying to join together before him in supplicating embrace. He could feel the softness of her hair as it came to rest against him just below the nape of his neck.

He parted them, flung them off, sending her backward from him. "Get yourself ready," he said grimly.

"If it's the money, wait--I have some here, I'll give it to you. And if it's not enough, I'll make it up--I swear I will--"

"Not for that. You were my wife, in law, and there was no crime committed, in law."

"Then for what?"

"To answer what became of Julia Russell. The real one. You're not Julia Russell and you never were. Do you pretend you are?"

She didn't answer. He thought he could detect more real fright now than at the time of the gun. Her eyes were wider, more strained, at any rate.

She quitted the drawer she had thrown open and been crouched beside, where the money was, and came toward him.

"To tell them what you did with her," he said. "And there's a name for that. Would you like to hear it?"

"No, no!" she protested, and even held her palms fronted toward him as she came close, but whether her protest was for the thought he had suggested, or for the very sound itself of the word he had threatened to utter, he could not tell. Almost, it seemed, the latter.

"Mur--" he began.

And then her palms had found his mouth and stopped it, terrifledly. "No, no! Lou, don't say that! I had nothing to do with it. I don't know what became of her. Only listen to me, hear me; Lou, you must listen to me!"

He tried to cast her off as he had before, but this time she clung, she would not be rejected. Though his arms flung her, she came back upon them again, carried by them.

"Listen to what? More lies? Our whole marriage was a lie. Every word you spoke to me, every breath you drew, in all that time was a lie. You'll tell them to the police, not to me any longer. I want no more of them!"

That word, just as the one she'd stifled before, seemed to have a particular terror for her. She quailed, and gave a little inchoate moan, the first sound of weakness she'd made yet. Or if it was artifice, calculation pretending to be weakness for its effect upon him, it succeeded by that much, for he took it to be weakness, and thus its purpose was gained.

Still clinging in desperation to the wings of his coat, she dropped to her knees before him, grovelling in posture of utmost supplication the human figure is capable of.

"No, no, the truth this time!" she sobbed drily. "Only the truth, and nothing else! If you'll only listen to me, let me speak--"

He stopped trying to rid himself of her at last, and stood there stolid.

"Would you know it?" he said contemptuously.

But she'd gained her hearing.

Her arms dropped from him, and she turned her head away for a moment and backed her hand to her own mouth. Whether in hurried search of inspiration, or whether steeling herself for the honest unburdening about to come, he could not tell.

"There's no train a while yet," he said grudgingly. "And I can't take you to the railroad station as you are now and keep you dawdling about there with me half the night--so speak if you want to." He dropped back into a chair, pulled at his collar as if exhausted by the emotional stress they had both just been through. "It will do you no good. I warn you before you begin, the outcome will be the same. You are coming back to New Orleans with me to face justice. And all your tears and all your kneeling and all your pleas are thrown away!"

Without rising, she inched toward him, crept as it were, on her very knees, so that the distance between them was again lessened, and she was at his very feet, penitent, abject, her hands to the arm of the chair he was in.

"It wasn't I. I didn't do it. He must have done something to her, for I never saw her again. But what it was, I don't know. I didn't see it done. He only came to me afterward and said she'd had a mishap, and I was afraid to question him any further than--"

"He?" he said sardonically.

"The man I was with. The man on the boat I was with."

"Your paramour," he said tonelessly, and tried not to let her see him swallow the bitter lump that knobbed his throat.

"No!" she said strenuously. "No, he wasn't! You can believe it if you choose, but from first to last he wasn't. It was purely a working arrangement. And no one else ever was either, before him. I've learned to care for myself since I've been about in the world, and whether I've done things that were right, or done things that were wrong, I've been no man's but yours, Lou. No man's, until I married you."

He wondered why he felt so much lighter than a moment ago, and warned himself sternly he mustn't; and in spite of that, did anyway.

"Julia," he drawled reproachfully, as if in utter disbelief. "You ask me to believe that? Julia, Julia."

"Don't call me Julia," she murmured remorsefully. "That isn't my name."

"Have you a name?"

She moistened her lips. "Bonny," she admitted. "Bonny Castle."

He gave a nod of agreement that was a jeer in pantomime. "To the colonel, Bonny. To me, Julia. To Billy, something else. To the next man, something else again." He turned his face from her in disgust, then looked back again. "Is that what you were christened? Is that your baptismal name?"

"No," she said. "I was never christened. I never had a baptismal name."

"Everyone has a name, I thought."

"I never had even that. You need a mother and father to give you that. A wash basket on a doorstep can't give you that. Now do you understand?"

"Then where is it from ?"

"It's from a postal picture card," she said, and some old defiance and rancor still alive in her made her head go up higher a moment. "A postal picture card from Scotland that came to the foundling home, one day when I was twelve. I picked it up and stole a look. And on the face of it there was the prettiest scene I'd ever seen, of ivycovered walls and a blue lake. And it said 'Bonny Castle.' I didn't know what it meant, but I took that for my name. They'd called me Josie in the foundling home until then. I hated it. Anyway, it was no more my rightful name than this was. I've kept to this one ever since, so it's rightfully mine by length of usage if nothing else. What difference do a few drops of holy water sprinkled on your head make? Go on, laugh if you will," she consented bleakly.

"I no longer know how," he said in glum parenthesis. "You saw to that. How long were you there, at this institution ?"

"Until I was fifteen, I think. Or close onto it. I've never had an exact birthday, you see. That's another thing I've done without. I made one up for myself, at one time; just as the name. I chose St. Valentine's Day, because it was so festive. But then I tired of it after a while, and no longer kept up with it."

He gazed at her without speaking.

She sighed weariedly, to draw fresh breath for continuation.

"Anyway, I ran away from there when I Was fifteen. They accused me of stealing something, and they beat me for it. They'd accused me before, and they'd beaten me before. But at thirteen I knew no better than to endure it, at fifteen I no longer would. I climbed over the wall at night. Some of the other girls helped me, but they lacked the courage to come with me." And then she said with an odd, speculative sort of detachment, as though she were speaking of someone else: "That's one thing I've never been, at least: a coward."

"You've never been a coward," he assented, but as though finding small cause for satisfaction in the estimate.

"It was up in Pennsylvania," she went on. "It was bitterly cold. I remember trudging the roadside for hours, until at last a drayman gave me a ride in his wagon--"

"You're from the North?" he said. "I hadn't known. You don't speak as they do up there."

"North, South," she shrugged. "It's all one. I speak as they do wherever I've been last, until I come to a new place."

And always lies, he thought; never the truth.

"I came to Philadelphia. An old woman took me in for a while, an old witch. She found me ready to drop on the cobbles. I thought she was kind at first, but she wasn't. After she'd fed and rested me for a few days, she put me into the clothes of a younger child--! was small, you see--and took me with her to shop in the stores. She said 'Watch me,' and showed me how to filch things from the counters without being detected. I ran away from her too, finally."

"But not without having done it yourself, first." He watched her closely to see if she'd labor with the answer.

She didn't stop for breath. "Not without having done it myself, first. She would only give me food when I had."

"And then what happened?"

"I worked a little, as a scrub girl, a slavey; I worked in a bakery kitchen, helping to make the rolls; I even worked as a laundress' helper. I was homeless more often than I had a place to sleep." She averted her head for a moment, so that her neck drew into a taut line. "Mostly, I can no longer remember those days. What's more, I don't want to."

She probably sold herself on the streets, he thought, and his heart sickened at the suggestion, as though she were in actuality someone to cherish.

With an almost uncanny clairvoyance, she said just then: "There was one way I could have got along, but I wouldn't take it."

Lies, he vowed, lies; but his heart sang wildly.

"I ran in horror from a woman one night who had coaxed me into stopping in her house for a cup of tea."

"Admirable," he said drily.

"Oh, don't give me credit for goodness," she said, with a sudden little flare of candor. "Give me credit for perversity, rather. I hated every human being in the world, at times, in those days, for what I was going through; man, woman, and child. I would give no one what they wanted of me, because no one would give me what I wanted of them."

He looked downward mutely, trapped at last into credulity, however brief; this time even of the mind as well as the heart.

"Well, I'd best be brief. It's what happened on the river you want to know of, mainly. I fell in with a troupe of traveling actors, joined up with them. They didn't even play in regular theatres. They had no money to afford them. They went about and pitched tents. And from there I fell in with a man who was a professional gambler on the river boats. The girl who had been his partner before then had quitted him to marry a plantation owner--or so he told me-- and he was looking for someone to take her place. He offered me a share of his profits, if I would join with him." She waved her hand. "And it was but a different form of acting, after all. With quarters preferable to the ones I'd been used to." She stopped.

"He was the one," she told him.

"What was his name, what was he called?" he said with a sudden access of interest.

"What does it matter? His name was false, like mine was. On every trip it changed. It had to, as a precaution. Once it was McLarnin. Once it was Rideau. I doubt that I ever knew his real one, in all the time we were together. I doubt that he did himself, any more. He's gone now. Don't ask me to remember."

She's trying to protect him, he thought. "You must have called him something."

She gave a smile of sour reminiscence. "Brother dear.' So that others could hear me. That was part of my role. We traveled as brother and sister. I insisted on that. We each had our own cabin."

"And he agreed." It wasn't a question, it was a statement of disbelief.

"At first he objected. His former partner, it seems--well, that's neither here nor there. I pointed out to him that it was better even for his own purposes that way, and when I had made him see that, he agreed readily enough. Business came first with him, always. He had a sweetheart in every river town, he could forego one more. You see, I acted as the--attraction, the magnet, for him. My part was to drop my handkerchief on the deck, or collide with someone in a narrow passageway, or even lose my bearings and have to seek directions of someone. There is no harm in gentlemen striking up a respectful acquaintance with a man's unmarried sister. Whereas had I been thought his wife--or something else--they would have been deterred. Then, as propriety dictated, I would introduce my brother to them at the earliest opportunity. And the game would take place soon afterward."

"You played ?"

"Never. Only a shameless hussy would play cards with men."

"You were present, though."

"I replenished their drinks. Flirted a little, to keep them in good humor. I sided with them against my own brother when there was a dispute."

"You signalled."

Her shoulders tipped slightly, in philosophic resignation. "That's what I was there for."

His arms were folded, in the attitude of one passing grim judgment--or rather having already irrevocably passed it--whom none of the pleas, the importunities, of the suppliant could any longer sway. He tapped his fingers restlessly against the sides of his own arms.

"And what of Julia? The other Julia, the actual one?"

"I've come to that now," she murmured acquiescently. She drew deep breath to see her through the cumulative part of her recital. "We used to go down about once a month, never more often. It wouldn't have been prudent. Stop a while, and then go up again. We left St. Louis the eighteenth of May the last time, on the City of New Orleans."

"As she did."

She nodded. "The first night out something went wrong. He met his match at last. I don't know how it came about. It could not have been sheer luck on the prospect's part, for he had too many sure ways of curing that. It must have been that he'd finally come across someone who had even better tricks than his own up his sleeve. I couldn't see the man's cards; he seemed to play from memory, keeping them turned inward to one another face to face. And all my messages to show the suits, by fondling necklace, bracelet, earring, finger ring, were worthless, I couldn't send them. The game kept on for half the night, and my partner lost steadily, until at last he had nothing left to play with any longer. And since, in these games, the players were always travelers and strangers to one another, nothing but actual money was ever used, so the loss was real."

"The cheaters cheated," he commented.

"But long before that, hours earlier, the man had already asked me to leave the two of them to themselves. Pointedly, but in such a polite way that there was nothing I could do but obey, or risk bringing to the point of open accusation the certainty that it was obvious he already felt about me. He pretended he was unused to playing in the presence of ladies, and wished to remove his coat and waistcoat, and the instant permission I gave him to do so, he rejected, so I had to go. My partner tried to forbid it by every urgent signal at his command, but there was no further use in my remaining there, so I went. We'd fallen into our own trap, I'm afraid.

"Loitering on deck, beside the rail, a woman, unaccompanied like myself, presently stopped beside me and struck up a conversation. I was not used to chatting with other women, there was no meat in it for my purpose, so at first I gave her only half an ear.

"She was a fool. Within the space of minutes she was telling me all her business, unsolicited. Who she was, where she was bound, what her purpose in going there was. She was too trustful, she had no experience of the outside world. Especially the world of the river boats, and the people you meet on them.

"I tried to shake her off at first, but without succeeding. She attached herself to me, followed me around. It was as though she were starving for a confidante, had to have someone to pour out her heart to, she was brimming so full of romantic anticipations. She gave me your name, and, stopping by a lighted doorway, insisted on taking out and showing me the picture you had sent her, and even reading passages from the last letter or two you had sent her, as though they were Holy Gospel.

"At last, just when I was beginning to feel I could bear no more of it without revealing my true feelings by a burst of temper that would have startled her into silence once and for all, she discovered the-for her--lateness of the hour and fled in the direction of her own cabin like a tardy child, turning all the way to wave back at me, she was so taken by me.

"We had a bitter quarrel later that night, he and I. He accused me of neglecting our 'business.' Unwisely, in self-defense, I told him about her. That she was on her way, sight unseen, to marry a man worth one hundred thousand dollars, who--"

He straightened alertly. "How could she know that?" he said sharply. "I only told the 'you' that was supposed to be she after you'd once arrived and were standing on the dock beside me."

She laughed humorlessly. "She'd investigated, long before she'd ever left St. Louis. I may have fooled you in the greater way, but she fooled you just as surely in the lesser."

He held silent for a long moment, almost as if finding in this new revelation of feminine guile some amelioration of her own.

Presently, unurged, as if gauging to a nicety the length of time he should be allowed for contemplation, of what she knew him to be contemplating, she proceeded.

"I saw him look at me when I told him that. He broke off our quarrel then and there, and left me, and paced the deck for a while. I can only tell you what happened as it happened. I did not know then its meaning as it was happening. Looking back, I can give it meaning now. I couldn't have then. You must believe me. You must, Lou."

She clasped her hands, and brought them close before his face, and wrung them supplicatingly.

"I must? By what compulsion?"

"This is the truth I'm telling tonight. Every word the truth, if never before, if never again."

If never before, if never again, he caught himself gullibly repeating after her, unheard in his own mind.

"I went out again to find him, to ask him if he intended to recoup his losses any more that night; if he'd have any further need of me, or if I could shut my door and go to sleep. I found him motionless, in deep thought, against the rail. The moon was down and the river was getting dark. We were still coasting the lower Missouri shore, I think we were to clear it before dawn. I scarcely knew him for sure until I was at his elbow, he was so indistinct in the gloom.

"He said to me in a whisper, 'Knock on her door and invite her out for a walk on deck with you.'

"I said, 'But it's late, she may have already retired. She's unused to hours such as we keep.'

"Do as I tell you!' he ordered me fiercely. 'Or I'll put some compliance into you with my fists. Find some way of bringing her out here, you'll know how. Tell her you are lonely and want company. Or tell her there are some lights coming presently on the shore that are not to be missed, that she must see. If she is as innocent as you say, any excuse should do.'

"And he gave me a push that nearly sent me face down to the deck boards."

"You went?"

"I went. What could I do? Why should I suffer for a stranger? What stranger had ever suffered for me?"

He didn't answer that.

"I went to her door and I knocked, and when she called out, startled, to ask who it was, I remember answering in honeyed tones to reassure her, 'It's your new little friend, Miss Charlotte.'"

"You had that name upon the boat ?"

"For that voyage. She opened at once, so great was her trust in me. She had not yet removed her clothes, but told me she had been about to do so. If only she already had!"

"You're merciful now in retrospect," he let her know. "You weren't at the time."

She didn't flinch. "I delivered my invitation. I complained of a headache, and refusing all the remedies she instantly put herself out to offer me, said I preferred to let the fresh air cure it, and would she walk with me a while, because of the lateness of the hour.

"I remember I was strangely uneasy, as to what his intentions might be--oh, I knew he boded her no good, but I didn't dare allow myself to believe he meant her any actual bodily harm; some intricate blackmailing scheme, at most, I thought, to be brought to bear on her later, once she was married to you--and even as I spoke, I kept hoping she would refuse me, and I could give him that for an excuse. But she seemed to have become inordinately fond of me. Before I could ask her twice she had already accepted, her face all alight with pleasure at my seeking her out. She hurriedly put a shawl about her for warmth, and closed the door after her, and came away with me."

His interest had been trapped in spite of himself. "You are telling the truth, Julia? You are telling the truth ?" he said with bated breath.

"Bonny," she murmured deprecatingly.

"You are telling the truth? You did not know, actually, what the intent was ?"

"Why do I kneel here at your feet like this? Why are there tears of regret in my eyes? Look at them well. What shall I say to you, what shall I do? Shall I take an oath on it? Fetch a Bible. Open it before me. Hold its pages to my heart as I speak."

He had never seen her cry before. He wondered if she ever had. She cried as one unused to crying, who leashes it, stifles it, not knowing what it is, rather than one who has many times before made use of it for her own ends, and hence knows it is an advantage and lets it flow untrammelled, even abets it.

He waved aside the suggestion that his own skepticism had produced. "And then? And then ?" he pressed her.

"We walked the full length of the deck three times, in harmonious intimacy, as women will together." She stopped for a moment.

"What is it?"

"Something I just remembered. And wish I had not. Her arm was about my waist as we walked. Mine was not about hers, at least, but hers was about me. She chattered again about you, endlessly about you. It was always you, only you."

She drew a breath, as if again feeling the tension of that night, that promenade upon the lonely, darkened deck.

"Nothing happened. He did not accost us. At every shadow I had been ready to stifle a scream, but none of them was he. At last I had no further excuse to keep her out there with me. She asked me how my headache was, and I said it was gone. And she couldn't have dreamed the relief with which I told her so.

"I took her back to her door. She turned to me a moment, I remember, and even kissed my hand in fond good night, she was so taken with me. She said 'I'm so glad we've met, Charlotte. I've never really had a woman friend of my very own. You must come and see me and my--' and then she faltered prettily--'my new husband, visit with us, as soon as we're settled. I shall want new friends badly in my new life.' And then she opened her door and went in. Unharmed, untouched. I even heard her bolt it fast after her on the inside.

"And that was the last I ever saw of her."

She came to a full halt, as if knowing this was the time for it, to gain fullest the effect she wished to achieve.

"No more than that you participated?" he said slowly.

"No more than that I participated. No more than that I took part in it, whatever it was.

"I have thought of it since then," she resumed presently. "I see now what it was, what it must have been. I didn't at the time, or I would never have left her. I had thought he meant to accost her on the deck in some way; brutalize her into some predicament from which she could only extricate herself later by payment of money, or even steal some memento from her to be redeemed later in the same way, to preserve your trust in her and her own good name. It even occurred to me, as I made my way back to my own cabin alone, he might have changed his mind entirely, discarded the whole intention, whatever it had been. I'd known him to do that before, after a scheme was already under way, and without notifying me until afterward."

She shook her head sombrely. "No, he hadn't.

"He must have inserted himself in the cabin while she was gone from it with me, and lain in wait there on the inside. He wanted the opportunity, that was why he had me stroll the deck with her."

"But later--he never told you in so many words what happened in there, inside that cabin of hers?"

She shook her head firmly. "He never told me in so many words. Nor could I draw it out of him. He had no moments of confidence, no moments of weakness, especially not with women. The way in which he told me of it was not meant to be believed; I knew that, and he knew that as well. It was just a catch phrase, to gloss over a thing, to have done with it as quickly as possible. And yet that is the only way in which he would tell me of it, from first to last. And I must be content with that, that was all I got."

"And what was that ?"

"This is the way in which he told me of it, word for word. He came and knocked surreptitiously upon my door, and woke me, about an hour before daylight, when the whole boat was still asleep. He was fully dressed, but whether newly so or still from the night before, I don't know. He had a single scratch on his forehead, over the eyebrow. A very small one, not more than a half-inch mark. And that was all.

"He came in, closed the door carefully, and said to me very business-like and terse in manner, 'Get dressed, I want you for something. Your lady friend of last night had an accident awhile ago and fell from the boat in the dark. She never came up again.' And then he flung my various things at me, stockings and such, one by one, to hurry me along. That was all he told me, then or ever again, that she'd had an accident and fallen from the boat in the dark."

"But you knew?"

"How could I help but know? I told him I knew. He even so much as agreed I might know, admitted I might know. But his answer for that was 'What are you going to do about it?'

"I told him that wasn't in our bargain. 'Card-games are one thing, this another.'

"He carefully took off his ring first, so it wouldn't mar my skin, and he gave me the back of his hand several times, until my head swam, and, as he put it, 'it had taken a little of the religion out of me.' He threatened me. He said if I accused him, he would accuse me in turn. That we would both be jailed for it alike. And I had been seen with her, and he hadn't. That it would serve neither one of us any good, and undo the two of us alike. He also threatened, finally, that he would kill me himself if necessary, as the quickest way of stopping my mouth, if I tried to get anyone's ear.

"Then when he saw he had me sufficiently cowed and intimidated to listen, he reasoned with me. 'She's gone now beyond recall,' he pointed out, 'nothing you can do will bring her back up over the side, and there's a hundred thousand dollars waiting for you when you step off this boat in New Orleans tomorrow.'

"He swung back the door for me, and I adjusted my clothing, and followed him out.

"He took my baggage, the little I had, into his cabin and blended it with his. And hers we removed, between us, from her cabin to mine, to take the place of my own. Not forgetting that caged bird of hers. He took from his pocket her letters from you, and the photograph you had sent her, and I put them in my own pocketbook. And then we bided our time and waited.

"In the confusion of docking and disembarking she was not missed. No passenger remembered her, they were all busy with their own concerns. And each baggage-handler, if he noted her empty cabin at all, must have thought some other baggage-handler had taken charge of her and her belongings. We left the boat separately, he at the very beginning, I almost at the last. And that was not noticed either.

"I saw you standing there, and knew you from your photograph, and when at last the dock had cleared, I approached and stopped there by you. And there's the story, Lou."

She stopped, and settled back upon her own upturned heels, and her hands fell lifeless to her lap, as if incapable of further gesture. She seemed to wait thus, inert, deflated, for the verdict, for his judgment to be passed upon her. Everything about her sloped downward, shoulders, head, and even the curve of her back; only one thing turned upward: her eyes, fixed beseechingly upon his graven face.

"Not quite," he said. "Not quite. And what of What's-his-name? What was the further plan ?"

"He said he would send word to me when enough time had passed. And when I heard from him, I was to--"

"Do as you did."

She shook her head determinedly. "Not as I did. As it seemed to you I did, maybe. I met him once for a few moments, in secret, when I was out on one of my shopping tours without you--that part was by prearrangement--and I told him there was no need for him to count on me any longer, he must abandon the scheme, I could no longer prevail on myself to carry it out."

"Why did you have a change of heart?"

"Why must you be told that now?"

"Why shouldn't I be ?"

"It would be breath wasted. It wouldn't be believed."

"Let me be the judge."

"Very well then, if you must be told," she said almost defiantly. "I told him I could no longer contemplate doing what it had been intended for me to do. I told him I'd fallen in love with my own husband."

It was like a rainbow suddenly glistening in all its striped glory across dismal gray skies. He told himself it was an illusion, just as surely as its counterpart, the actual rainbow, is an illusion in Nature. But it wouldn't dim, it wouldn't waver; there it beamed, the sign of hope, the sign heralding sunshine to come.

She had gone on without interruption, but the grateful shock of that previous remark, still flooding over him in benign warmth, had caused him to lose the sense of a part of her words.

"--laughed and said I no more knew what love was than the man in the moon. Then he turned vengeful and told me I was lying and simply trying to keep the whole of the stake for myself alone."

I'd fallen in love, kept going through his head, dimming the sound of her voice. It was like a counterpoint that intrudes upon the basic melody and all but effaces it.

"I tried to buy him off. I said he could have the money, all I could lay my hands on, almost as much as he might have expected in the first place, if he would only quit New Orleans, let me be. Yes, I offered to rob my own husband, endanger the very thing I was trying to hold onto, if he would only let me be, let me stay as I was, happy for the first time in my life."

Happy for the first time in her life, the paean swelled through his mind. She was really happy with me.

"If he would only have accepted the bribe, I had in mind some desperate excuse to you--that my purse had been snatched in a crowd, that I'd dropped the money in the street, after drawing it from the bank; that my 'sister' had suddenly fallen ill and was without means, and I'd sent it to her in St. Louis--oh, anything, anything at all, no matter how thin, how paltry, so long as it was less discreditable than the reality. Yes, I would have risked your displeasure, your disapproval, even worse than that, your very real suspicion, if only I was allowed to keep you for myself as I wanted to, to go on with you."

To go on with you. He could remember the warmth of her kisses now, the unbridled gaiety of her smiles. What actress could have played such a part, morning, noon, and night? Even actresses play but an hour or two of an evening, have a respite the rest of the time. It must have been sincere reality. He could remember the look in her eyes when he took leave of her that last day; a sort of lingering, reluctant melancholy. (But had it been there then, or was he putting it in now?)

"That wouldn't satisfy him, wouldn't do. He wanted all of it, not part. And, I suppose, there was truly no solution. No matter how large a sum I would have given him, he would still have thought I was keeping far more than that myself. He trusted no one--I heard it said of him, in a quarrel once--not even himself.

"Taking me at my word, that I loved you, he discovered he had a more powerful threat to hold over me now. And no sooner had he discovered it, than he brought it into play. That he would reveal my imposture to you himself, anonymously, in a letter, if I refused to carry out our deal. He wouldn't have his money, maybe, but neither should I have what I wanted. We'd both be fugitives alike, and back where we started from. 'And if you intercept my letter,' he warned, 'that won't help you any. I'll go to him myself and make the accusation to his face. Let him know you're not only not who you claimed, but were my sweetheart all those years to boot.' Which wasn't true," she added rather rapidly in an aside. "'We'll see how long he'll keep you with him then.'

"And as I left him that day," she went on. "I knew it was no use, no matter what I did. I knew I was surely going to lose you, one way or another.

"I passed a sleepless night. The letter came, all right. I'd known it would. He was as good as his word, in all things like that; and only in things like that. I seized it. I was waiting there by the door when the post came. I tore it open and read it. I can still remember how it went. 'The woman you have there in your house with you is not the woman you take her to be, but someone of another name, and another man's sweetheart as well. I am that man, and so I know what I am saying Keep a close watch upon your money, Mr. Durand. If you disbelieve me, watch her face closely when you say to her without warning, "Bonny, come here to me," and see how it pales.' And it was signed, 'A friend.'

"I destroyed it, but I knew the postponement I'd gained was only for a day or two. He'd send another. Or he'd come himself. Or he'd take me unaware sometime when I was out alone, and I'd be found lying there with a knife-hilt in my side. I knew him well; he never forgave anyone who crossed him." She tried to smile, and failed in the attempt. "My doll house had come tumbling down all about my ears.

"So I made my decision, and I fled."

"To him."

"No," she said dully, almost as if this detail were a matter of indifference, now, this long after. "I took the money, yes. But I fled from him just as surely as I deserted you. That small satisfaction was all I had out of it: he hadn't gained his way. The rest was ashes. All my happiness lay behind me. I remember thinking at the time, we formed a triangle, we three, a strange one. You were love, and he was death--and I was the mid-point between the two.

"I fled as far away as I could. I took the northbound boat and kept from sight until it had left New Orleans an hour behind. I went to Memphis first, and then to Louisville, and at last to Cincinnati, and stayed there hidden for some time. I was in fear for my life for a while. I knew he would have surely killed me had he found me. And then one day, in Cincy, I heard a report from someone who had once known us both slightly when we were together, that he had lost his life in a shooting affray in a gaming house in Cairo. So the danger was past. But it was too late by that time to undo what had been done. I couldn't return to you any more."

And the look she gave him was of a poignancy that would have melted stone.

"I made my way back South again, now that it was safe to do so, and only a few weeks ago met this Colonel Worth, and now I'm as you find me. And that's my story, Lou."

She waited, and the silence, now that she was through speaking, seemed to prolong itself into eternity.

He was looking at her steadfastly, but uttered not a word. But behind that calm, reflective, judicious front he maintained so stoically, there was an unguessed turmoil, raging, a chaos, of credulity and disbelief, accusation and refutation, pro and con, to and fro, and around and around and around like a whirlpool.

She took your money, nonetheless; why, if she "loved" you so? She was about to face the world alone for years to come, she knew only too well how hard it is for a woman alone to get along in the world, she'd had that lesson from before. Can you blame her?

How do you know she didn't cheat the two of you alike; that what it was, was nothing more than what he accused her of, of running off and keeping the entire booty for herself, without dividing it with him? A double betrayal, instead of a single.

At least she is innocent of Julia's death, you heard that. How do you know even that? The living, the survivor, is here to tell her side of the tale to you, but the dead, the victim, is not here to tell you hers. It might be a different story.

You. loved her then, you do not question yourself on that. Why then do you doubt her when she says she loved you then? Is she not as capable of love as you? And who are you to say who is to feel love, and who is not? Love is like a magnet, that attracts its like. She must have loved you, for your love to be drawn to her. Just as you must have loved her--and you know you did--for her love to be drawn to you. Without one love, there cannot be another. There must be love on both sides, for the current to complete itself.

"Aren't you going to say something to me, Lou?"

"What is there to say?"

"I can't tell you that. It must come from you."

"Must it?" he said drily. "And if there is nothing there to give you, no answer

"Nothing, Lou ?" Her voice took on a singsong timbre. "Nothing?" It became a lulling incantation. "Not even a word?" Her face rose subtly nearer to his. "Not even--this much?" He had seen pictures, once, somewhere, of India, of cobras rising from their huddles to the charmer's tune. And like one of those, so sleekly, so unguessably, she had crept upward upon him before he knew it; but this was the serpent charming the master, not the master the serpent. "Not even--this ?"

Suddenly he was caught fast, entwined with her as with some treacherous tropic plant. Lips of fire were fused with his. He seemed to breathe flame, draw it down his windpipe into his breast, where the dry tinder of his loneliness, of his long lack of her, was kindled by it into raging flame, that pyred upward, sending back her kiss with insane fury.

He struggled to his feet, and she rose with him, they were so interlocked. He flung her off with all the violence he would have used against another man in full-bodied combat; it was needed, nothing less would have torn her off.

She staggered, toppled, fell down prone, one arm alone, thrust out behind her, keeping one shoulder and her head upward a little from the floor.

And lying there, all rumpled and abased, yet somehow she had on her face the glint of victory, on her lips a secretive smile of triumph. As though she knew who had won the contest, who had lost. She lolled there at her ease, too sure of herself even to take the trouble to rise. It was he who wallowed, from chair back to chair back, stifling, blinded, like something maimed; his ears pounding to his own blood, clawing at his collar, as if the ghosts of her arms were still there, strangling him.

He stood over her at last, clenched hand upraised above his head, as if in threat to strike her down a second time should she try to rise. "Get yourself ready!" he roared at her. "Get your things! Not that nor anything else will change it! I'm taking you back to New Orleans!"

She sidled away from him a little along the floor, as if to put herself beyond his reach, though her smirk denied her fear; then gathered herself together, rose with an innate grace that nothing could take from her, not even such violent downfall.

She seemed humbled, docile to his bidding, seemed resigned; all but that knowing smile, that gave it the lie. She made no further importunity. She swept back her hair, a lock of which had tumbled forward with her fall. Her shoulders hinted at a shrug. Her hands gave an empty slap at her sides, recoiled again, as if in fatalistic acceptance.

He turned his back on her abruptly, as he saw her hands go to the fastenings at the side of her waist, already partly sundered.

"I'll wait out here in this little entryway," he said tautly, and strode for it.

"Do so," she agreed ironically. "It is some time now that we have been apart."

He sat down on a little backless wall-bench that lined the place, just within the outer apartment door.

She came slowly over after him and slowly swung the second door around, the one between them, leaving it just short of closure.

"My windows are on the second floor," she reassured him, still with that overtone of irony. "And there is no ladder outside them. I am not likely to try to escape."

He bowed his head suddenly, as sharply as if his neck had fractured, and pressed his two clenched hands tight against his forehead, through the center of which a vein stood out like whipcord, pulsing and throbbing with a congestion of love battling hate and hate battling love, that he alone could have told was going on, so still he crouched.

So they remained, on opposite sides of a door that was not closed. The victor and the vanquished. But on which side was which?

A drawer ticked open, scraped closed again, behind the door. A whiff of fresh essence drifted out and found him, as if skimmed off the top of a field of the first flowers of spring. The light peering through from the other side dimmed somewhat, as if one or more of its contributing agents had been eliminated.

Suddenly he turned his head, finding the door had already been standing open a second or two before his discovery of it. She was standing there in the inviting new breadth of its opening, one arm to door, one arm to frame. The foaming laces that cascaded down her were transparent as haze against the light bearing directly on her from the room at her back. Her silhouette was that of a biped.

Her eyes were dreamy-lidded, her half-smile a recaptured memory of forgotten things.

"Come in, Lou," she murmured indulgently, as if to a stubborn little boy who has put himself beyond the pale. "Put out the light there by you and come into your wife's room."

39

A sound at the door awoke Durand. It was a delicate sort of tapping, a coaxing pit-pat, as if with one fingernail.

As his eyes opened he found himself in a room he had difficulty recalling from the night before. The cooling silvery-green of lowburning night lights was no longer there. Ladders of fuming Gulf Coast sunlight came slanting through the slits of the blinds, and formed a pattern of stripes across the bed and across the floor. And above this, there was a reflected brightness, as if everything had been newly whitewashed; a gleaming transparency.

It was simply that it was day in a place that he had last seen when it was night.

He thought he was alone at first. He backed a hand to his drugged eyes, to keep out some of the overacute brilliancy. "Where am I?"

Then he saw her. Her cloverleaf mouth smiled back at him, indirectly, via the surface of the mirror she sat before. Her hand sought her bosom, and she let it linger there a moment, one finger pointing upward, one inward as if toward her heart. "With me," she answered. "Where you belong."

There was something fragilely charming, he thought, in the evanescent little gesture while it lasted. And he watched it wistfully and hated to see it end, the hand drop back as it had been. It had been so unstudied. With me; finger unconsciously to her heart.

The stuttering little tap came again. There was something coy about it that irritated him. He turned his head and frowned over that way. "Who's that?" he asked sternly, but of her, not the door.

She shaped her mouth to a soundless symbol of laughter; then she stilled it further, though it hadn't come at all, by spoking her fingers over it, fanwise. "A suitor, I'm afraid. The colonel. I know him by his tap."

Durand, his face growing blacker by the minute, was at the bedside now, struggling into trousers with a sort of cavorting hop, to and fro.

The tapping had accosted them a third time.

He cut his thumb slashingly backhand toward the door, in pantomime to have her answer it temporizingly while he got ready.

"Yes?" she said sweetly.

"It's Harry, my dear," came through the door. "Good morning. Am I too early."

"No, too late," growled Durand surlily. "I'll attend to 'Harry, my dear' in a moment!" he vowed to her in an undertone.

She was in stitches by now, head prone on the dressing table, hands clasped across the back of her neck, palpitating with smothered laughter.

"In a minute," she said half-strangled.

"Don't hurry yourself, my dear," the cooing answer came back. "You know I'll wait all morning for you, if necessary. To wait outside your door for you to come out is the pleasantest thing I know of. There is only one thing pleasanter, and that would be-"

The door sliced back and he found himself confronted by Durand, feet unshod, hair awry, and in nothing but trousers and undershirt.

To make it worse, his face had been bearing down close against the door, to make himself the better heard. He found his nose almost pressed into Durand's coarse-spun barley-colored underwear, at about the height of Durand's chest.