Waltz Into Darkness

His head went up a notch at a time, like something worked on a pulley, until it was level with Durand's own. And for each notch he had a strangulated exclamation, like a winded grunt. Followed by a convulsive swallowing. "Unh--? Anh--? Unh--?"

"Well, sir ?" Durand rapped out.

Worth's hand executed helpless curlycues, little corkscrew waves, trying to point behind Durand but unable to do so.

"You're--in there? You're--not dressed?"

"Will you kindly mind your business, sir?" Durand said sternly.

The colonel raised both arms now overhead, fists clenched, in some sort of approaching denunciation. Then they faltered, froze that way, finally crumbled. His eyes were suddenly fixed on Durand's right shoulder. They dilated until they threatened to pop from his head.

Durand could feel her arm glide caressingly downward over his shoulder, and then her hand tipped up to fondle his chin, while she herself remained out of sight behind him. He looked down to where Worth was staring at it, and it was the one with the wedding band, their old wedding band, on it.

It rose, was stroking and petting Durand's cheek now, letting the puffy gold circlet flash and wink conspicuously. It gave the slack of his cheek a fond little pinch, then spread the two fingers that had just executed it wide apart, in what might have been construed as a jaunty salute.

"I--I--I didn't know!" Worth managed to gasp out asthmatically, as if with his last breath.

"You do now, sir!" Durand said severely. "And what brings you to my wife's door, may I ask?"

The colonel was backing away along the passage now, brushing the wall now at this side, now at that, but incapable apparently of turning around once and for all and tearing his eyes off the hypnotic spectacle of Durand and the affectionate straying hand.

"I--I beg your pardon!" he succeeded in panting at last, from a safe distance.

"I beg yours!" Durand rejoined with grim inflexibility.

The colonel turned at last and fled, or rather wallowed drunkenly, away.

The detached hand suddenly went up in air, bent its fingers inward, and flipped them once or twice.

"Ta ta," her voice called out gaily, "lovey mine!"

40

Arms close-knit about one another's waists, leaning almost avidly from the open window of her room, shimmering in unison with laughter, they watched the streaming debacle of the colonel's luggage, poured forth from under the veranda shed, followed by its owner's hurried, trotting departure. The colonel could not seem to climb into his waiting coach quickly enough and be gone from this scene of ego-shrivelling discomfiture with enough haste; he all but hopped in on one leg, like an ungainly crane in waddling earthbound flight, and the whole buggy rocked with his plunge.

It was not his own private conscience that spurred him on, conjecturably, it was public ridicule. The story had obviously spread like wildfire about the establishment, in the inexplicable way of such things at seashore resorts, though neither Durand nor she had breathed a word to living soul. It was as though the tale were water and the hotel a sponge; it was as though the keyholes themselves had found tongues for their perpendicular slitted mouths and whispered it. Strollers entering or leaving, at this moment, as he was going, stopped and turned to stare at the spectacle he made in flight, with either outright smiles visible upon their faces, or tactfully sheltering hands to mouths, which betrayed the fact that there were smiles beneath them to conceal.

The colonel fled, within a sheltering turret of his own massed luggage piled high on the seat, the plumage of his male pride as badly frizzled as feathers in a flame. The yellow wheel spokes sluiced into solidified disks, a spurt of dust haze arose, the roadway was empty, the colonel was gone.

She had even wanted to wave, this time with her handkerchief, as she had waved at the door an hour or so before, but Durand, some remnants of masculine fellow-feeling stirring in him, held her hand back, quenched the gesture, though laughing all the same. They turned from the window, still chuckling, arms still tight about one another in new-found possession. They had been cruel just now, though they hadn't intended it, their only thought had been their own amusement. Yet what is cruelty but the giving of pain in the taking of pleasure?

"Oh, dear !" she exhaled, breathless. She parted from him, drooped exhausted over the back of a chair. "That man. He wasn't cut out to be a romantic lover. Yet always that is the type that tries hardest to play the role. I wonder why?"

"Am I?" he asked her, curious to hear what she would say.

She turned her eyes toward him, lidded them inexpressibly. "Oh, Louis," she said in bated whisper. "Can you ask me that? You're the perfect example. With the blushes of a boy--look at you now. The arms of a tiger. And a heart as easily broken as a woman's."

The tiger part was the only one that appealed to him; he decided the other two were wholly her own imaginings.

He exercised them once again, briefly but heartily, as any man would after such prompting.

"We'll have to go soon ourselves," he reminded her presently.

"Why ?" she asked, as if willing enough but failing quite to understand the need to do so.

Then thinking she had found the answer for herself, gave it to him without waiting. "Oh, because of what's happened. Yes, it's true; I was seen with him constantly all these past--"

"No," he said, "that isn't what I meant. It's that--business on the boat. I told you last night, I went to a private investigator in St. Louis, and so far as I know he's still engaged upon it."

"There's no warrant out, is there?"

"No, but I think it's better for us to stay out of his way. I'd rather not have him accost us, or even learn where we are to be found."

"He has no police power, has he?" she asked with quick, brittle interest.

"Not so far as I know. I don't know what he can do or can't do, and I've no wish to find out. The police in New Orleans told me you were immune, but that was at that time, before he took hand in it. Your immunity may expire from one minute to the next, when least we expect it, while he's still around and about. It's safer for us not to place ourselves too close at hand, under their thumbs. Don't you see, we can't go back to New Orleans now."

"No," she agreed without emotion, "we can't."

"And it's better for us not to linger here too long either. Word travels quickly. You cannot help drawing the admiration of all eyes wherever you appear. You're no drab wallflower. Besides, my own presence here is well known; I made no secret I was coming here, and they'd know where to reach me-"

"Will you--be able to?"

He knew what she meant.

"I have enough for now. And I can get in touch with Jardine, if need should arise."

She raised her hand and snapped her fingers close before her face. "Very well, we'll go," she said gaily. "We'll be on our way before the sun goes down. Where shall it be? You name it."

He pocketed one hand, spread the other palm up. "How about one of the northern cities? They're large, they can swallow us whole, we'll never be noticed. Baltimore, Philadelphia, even New York--"

He saw her chew the corner of her underlip in sudden distaste. "Not the North," she said, with a distant look in her eyes. "It's cold and gray and ugly, and it snows--"

He wondered what Damoclean sword of retribution, from out of the past, hung over her suspended there.

"We'll stay down here, then," he said, without hesitation. "It's closer to them, and we'll have to keep moving about more often. But I want to please you. What about Mobile or Birmingham, then; those are large enough towns to lose ourselves in."

She made her choice with a pert little nod. "Mobile for now. I'll begin to pack at once."

She stopped again in a moment, holding some article in her hands, and drew close to him once more. "How different this is from last night. Do you remember? Then it was an arrest. Now it is a honeymoon."

"The beginning of a new life. Everything new. New plans, new hopes, new dreams. A new destination. A new you. A new I."

She crept into his arms, looked up at him, her very soul in her eyes. "Do you forgive? Do you take me back?"

"I never met you before last night. There is no past. This is our real wedding day."

The "tiger-arms" showed their stripes, went around her once more.

"My Lou," she sobbed ecstatically.

"My Jul--"

"Careful, there," she warned, with finger upright to his lips.

"My Bonny."

41

Mobile, then.

They went to the finest hotel there, and like the bride and groom they were in everything but count of time, they took its finest suite, its bridal suite. Chamber and sitting room, height of luxury, lace curtains over the windows, maroon drapes, Turkish carpeting thick on the floors, and even that seldom-met-with innovation, a private bath of their own that no one else had access to, complete with clawlegged tub enamelled in light green.

Bellhops danced attendance on them from morning to night, and all eyes were on them every time they came and went through the public rooms below. The petite blonde, always so dainty, so exquisitely dressed, with the tall dark man beside her, eyes for no one else. "That romantic pair from--" Nobody knew just where, but everybody knew who was meant.

More than one sigh of benevolent regret swept after them.

"I declare, it makes me feel a little younger just to look at them."

"It makes me feel a little sad. Because we all know that it cain't last. They're bound to lose it 'fore long."

"But they've had it."

"Yes, they've had it."

Every sprightly supper resort in town knew them, every gay and brightly lighted gathering place, every theatre, public ball, entertainment, minstrelsy. Every time the violins played, somewhere, anywhere, she was in his arms there, turning in the endless, fevered spirals of the waltz. Every time the moon was full, she was in his arms there, somewhere, in a halted carriage, heads close together, sweetness of magnolia all around, gazing up at it with dreamy, wondering eyes.

But they were right, the musers and the sighers and the castasides in the hotel lobby. It lasts such a short time. It comes but once, and goes, and then it never comes again. Even to the upright, to the blessed, it never comes again. And how much less likely, to the hunted and the doomed.

But this was their moment of it now, this was their time for it, their share: Durand and his Julia. (Julia, for love's first thought is its lasting one, love's first name for itself, is its true one.) The sunburst of their happiness. The brief blaze of their noon.

Mobile, then, in the flood tide of their romance; and all was rapture, all was love.

42

Without raising her eyes, she smiled covertly, showing she was well aware that his gaze was lingering on her, there in the little sitting room outside their bedroom. Studying her like an elusive lesson; a lesson that seems simple enough at first glance, but is never to be fully learned, though the student goes back to it again and again.

"What are you thinking ?" she teased, keeping her eyes still downcast.

"Of you."

She took that for granted. "I know. But what, of me ?"

He sat down beside her, at the foot of the chaise longue, tilted his knee, hugged it, and cast his eyes upon her more speculatively than ever. Shaking his head a little, as if in wonderment himself, that this should be so.

"I used to want what they call a good wife. That was the only kind I ever thought I'd have. A proper little thing who'd sit demurely, working a needle through a hoop, both feet planted on the floor. Head submissively lowered to her task, who'd look up when I spoke and 'Aye' and 'Nay' me. But now I don't. Now I only want a wife like you. With yesterday's leftover dye still on her cheeks. With the tip of her bent knee poked brazenly through her dressing gown. With cigar ashes on the floor about her. Jeering at a man in their most private moments, egging him on, then ridiculing him, rather than swooning limp into his arms." He shook his head, more helplessly than ever. "Bonny, Bonny, what have you done to me? Though I still know you should be like that, like those others are, I don't want anyone like that any more. I've forgotten there are any. I only want you; bad as you are, heartless as you are, exactly as you are, I only want you."

Her tarnished golden laughter welled up, showered down upon the two of them like counterfeit coins.

"Lou, you're so gullible. There aren't two kinds of women; there never were, there never will be. Only one kind of woman, one kind of man-- And both of them, alike, not much good." Her laughter had stopped; her face was tired and wise, and there was a little flicker of bitterness, as she said the last.

"Lou," she repeated, "you're so--unaware."

"Are you sure that's the word you had in mind?"

"Innocent," she agreed.

"Innocent?" he parried wryly.

"A woman's innocence is like snow on a hot stove; it's gone at the first touch. But when a man is innocent, he can have had ten wives, and he's as innocent at the end of them all as he was at the beginning. He never learns."

He shivered feverishly. "I know you drive me mad. At least I've learned that much."

She threw herself backward on the couch, her head hanging over so that she was looking behind her toward the ceiling, in a sort of floundering luxuriance. She extended her arms widely upward in a greedy, grasping, ecstatic V. Her voice was a dreamy chant of longing.

"Lou, buy me a new dress. All white satin and Chantilly lace. Lou, buy me a great big emerald for my pinkey. Buy me diamond drops for my ears. Take me out in a carriage to twelve o'clock supper at some lobster palace. I want to look at the chandelier lights through the layers of colored liqueurs in a pousse café. I want to feel champagne trickle down my throat while the violins play gypsy music. I want to live, I want to live, I want to live! The time is so short, and I won't get a second turn--"

Then, as her fear of infinity, her mistrust that Providence would look out for her if left to its own blind course-for it was that at bottom, that and nothing else--were caught by him in turn, and he was kindled into a like fear and defiance of their fate, he bent swiftly toward her, his lips found hers, and her litany of despair was stilled.

Until, presently, she sighed: "No, don't take me anywhere-- You're here, I'm here- The champagne, the music are right here with us-- Everything's here-- No need to look elsewhere--"

And her arms dropped, closed over him like the trap they were.

43

Presently they quitted their suite in the hotel and rented a house. An entire house, for their own. A house with an upstairs and down.

It was at her suggestion. And it was she who engaged the agent, accompanied him to view the several prospects he had to offer, and made the final selection. An "elegant" (that was her word for it) though rather gingerbready affair on one of the quieter residential streets, tree flanked. Then all he had to do was sign the necessary papers, and with but a coaxing smile or two from her, he did so, with the air of a man fondly indulging a child in her latest whim. A whim that, he suspects, tomorrow she will have tired of; but that, while it remains valid, today, he has not the heart to refuse her.

It seemed to fill some long-felt, deep-seated, longing on her part: a house of one's own; to be--more than merely an expression of great wealth--an expression of legitimate great wealth; to be the ultimate in stability, in belonging, in caste. It was as if her catalogue of values ran thus: jewels and fine clothes, any fly-by-night may have them from her sweetheart; even a lawfully wedded husband, any sweetheart may be made into one if you cared to take the pains; but a house of your own, then indeed you had reached the summit, then indeed you were socially impregnable, then indeed you were a great lady. Or (pitiful parenthesis) as you fondly imagined one to be.

"It's so much grander," she said. She sighed wistfully. "It makes me feel like a really married woman."

He laughed indulgently. "What had you felt like until now, madame ?"

"Oh, it is useless to tell this to a man!" she said with a little spurt of playful indignation.

And it was, in truth, for each of them had the instincts of their own kind.

Even when he tried, half-teasingly, and only when the arrangement had already been entered into, to warn her and point out the disadvantages, she would have none of it.

"But who'll cook for us? A house takes looking after. You're taking on a great many cares."

She threw up her hands. "Well, then I'll have servants, like the other ladies who have houses of their own. You'll see; leave that to me."

A colored woman appeared, and lasted five days. There was some question of a missing trinket. Then after her stormy discharge and departure, which filled the lower floor with noise for some fifteen minutes, Bonny came to him presently and admitted she had unearthed the valuable in a place she had forgotten having put it.

"Why didn't you search first, and then accuse her afterward ?" he pointed out, as gently as he could. "That is what any other lady, mistress of her own house, would have done."

"Oh, would she?" She seemed at a loss. "I did not think of that."

"You must not tyrannize over them," he tried to instruct her. "You must be firm and gentle at the same time. Otherwise you show that you are not used to having servants of your own."

The second one lasted three days. There was less commotion, but there were tears this time. On Bonny's part.

"I tried being gentle," she came to him and reported, "and she paid no heed to any of my orders. I don't seem to know how to handle them. If I am severe, they walk out. If I am kind, they do not do their work."

"There is an art to it," he consoled her. "You will acquire it presently."

"No," she said. "There is something about me. They look at me and sneer. They do not respect me. They will take more from another woman, and be docile; they will take nothing from me, and still be impudent. Is this not my own house? Am I not your wife? What is it about me?"

He could not answer that, for he saw her with the eyes of love, and he could not tell what eyes they saw her with, nor see with theirs.

"No," she said in answer, to his suggestion, "no more servants. I've had enough of them. Let me do it. I can try, I can manage."

A meal followed that was a complete fiasco. The eggs broke in the water meant to boil them, and a sort of milky stew resulted, neither to be eaten nor to be drunk. The coffee had the pallor of tea without any of its virtues, and on second try became a muddy abomination that filled their mouths with grit. The toast was tinctured with the cologne that she so liberally applied to her hands.

He uttered not a word of reproach. He stood up and discarded his napkin. "Come," he said, "we're going back to the hotel for our meals."

She hastened to get her things, as if overjoyed herself at this solution.

And on their way over he said, "Now aren't you sorry ?" with a twinkle in his eye.

But on this point, at least, she was steadfast. "No," she said. "Even if we have to eat elsewhere, at least I still have my own house. I would not change that for anything." And she repeated what she'd said before. "I want to feel like a really married woman. I want to feel like all the rest do. I want to know what it feels like."

She couldn't, it seemed, quite get used to the idea that she was legally married to him, and all this was hers by right and not by conquest.

44

Increasingly uncomfortable, and extremely bored in addition, feeling that all eyes were on him, he paced back and forth in the modiste's anteroom, and at every turn seemed to come into collision with some hurrying young girl carrying fresh bolts of goods into a curtained recess behind which Bonny had disappeared an interminable length of time previously. These flying supernumeraries always came out again empty handed; judging by the quantity of material that he had already seen go in the alcove, with none ever taken out again, it should have been filled to ceiling height by this time.

He could hear her voice at intervals, topping the rustles of unwound fabric lengths and carefully chosen phrases of professional inducement.

"I cannot decide! The more you bring in to show me, the harder it becomes to settle on one. No, leave that, I may come back to it."

Suddenly the curtains parted, gripped by restraining hands just below the breach, so that it could not spread downward, and her head, no more, peered through.

"Lou, am I taking dreadfully long? I just remembered you, out there."

"Long, but not dreadfully," he answered gallantly.

"What are you doing with yourself?" she asked, as if he were a small boy left for a risky moment to his own, devices.

"Getting in everyone's way, I'm afraid," he admitted.

There was a chorus of polite feminine laughter, both from before and behind the Secretive curtain, as though he had said something very funny indeed.

"Poor thing," she said contritely. Her head turned to someone behind her. The grip on the curtain slit slid slightly downward for a moment, and the turn of an unclad shoulder was revealed, a tapelike strip of white ribbon its only covering. "Haven't you any magazines or something for him to look over, pass the time with ?"

"Only pattern magazines, I'm afraid, madam."

"No, thank you," he said very definitely.

"It's so hard on them," she said patronizingly, still in conversation with someone behind her. Then back to him once more. "Why don't you leave and then call back for me again ?" she suggested generously. "That way you needn't suffer so, and I can put my whole mind to this."

"How soon shall I come back?"

"I won't be through for another hour yet at the very least. We haven't even got past the choice of a material yet. Then will come the selection of a pattern, and the cutting, and the taking of the over-all measurements--"

"Unh," he groaned facetiously, and another courtier-like laugh went up.

"You had best give me a full hour and a half, I shall need that much. Or if you tire in the meantime, go straight back to the house, and I'll follow you there."

He took up his hat with alacrity, glad to make his escape.

Her bodyless face, formed its lips, into a pout.

"Aren't you going to say goodbye to me?"

She touched her lips to show him what she meant, closed her eyes expectantly.

"In front of all these people?"

"Oh dear, how you talk! One would think you weren't my husband at all. I assure you it's perfectly proper, in such a case."

Again a chorus of flattery-forced laughter went up, almost as if on cue. She seemed to make quite an opéra bouffe entertainment of the making of a new dress, taking the part of main luminary surrounded by a doting, submissive chorus. There should have been music, he couldn't help reflecting, and a tiered audience surrounding her on three sides.

He stepped over to the curtains, coloring slightly, pecked at her lips, turned, and got out of the place.

Strangely, in spite of his embarrassment, he had a flattered, selfimportant feeling at the same time; he wondered how she had been able to give him that, and whether she had known she was doing it when she did. And secretly decided that she had.

She knew every cause, she knew every effect, she knew how to achieve them. Everything she did, she knew she did.

There must have been other times, in other modistes' fitting rooms, when the man waiting was not legally obligated to shoulder the expense she was incurring, that this glow of self-esteem had had an intrinsic value of its--

He put that thought hurriedly from mind, and set out to enjoy the afternoon sunlight, and the blue Gulf reaching to the horizon, and the crowd of strollers drifting along the shoreline promenade. He mingled with them for a while, taking his place in the leisurely moving outermost stream, then turned at the end of the structure and came back with them, but now a part of the inside stream going in the opposite direction.

The slow baking warmth of the sun was pleasant on his shoulders and his back, and occasionally a little salty breeze would come, just enough to temper it. Clouds that were thick and unshadowed as egg white broke the monotony of the sky, and on everyone's face there was a smile-as there must have been on his, he at last realized, for what he was seeing was the unthinking answer to his own smile, offered by face after face in passing; without purpose or premeditation, without knowing they were doing it, simply in shared contentment.

He had money enough now for a long while to come, and she loved him--she had shown it by inducing him to kiss her in front of a shopful of girls. What more was there to wish for?

The world was a good world.

A little boy's harlequin-sectioned ball glanced against his leg in rolling, and the child himself clung to it for a moment in the act of unsteady retrieval. Durand stopped where he was and reached down and tousled still further the already tousled cornsilk thatch.

"Does your mother let you take a penny from a strange man?"

The youngster looked up, open-mouthed with that infantile stupefaction that greets every act of the grown world. "I 'on't know."

"Well, take this to show her then and find out."

He went on again without waiting.

The world was a good world indeed.

After two complete circuits of the walking space provided, he stopped at last by the wooden rail flanking it, and rested his elbows on it, and stood in contemplation with his back to the slow-moving ainbulators he had just been a member of.

He had been at rest that way for perhaps two or three minutes, no more, when he became conscious of that rather curiously compelling sensation that is received when someone's eyes are fixed on one steadfastly, from behind.

There was no time to be warned. The impulse was to turn and seek out the cause, and before he could check it he had done so.

He found himself staring full into the face of Downs, the St. Louis investigator, just as Downs was now staring full into his.

He was within two or three paces of Durand, almost close enough to have reached out and touched him had he willed. His whole body was still held in the act of an arrested footfall, the one at which recognition had struck; one leg out behind him, heel clear of ground. Shoulders still forward, the way in which he had been going; head alone oblique, frozen that way at first sight of Durand.

Durand had a sickening impression that had he kept his own place in the belt line of promenaders, they might have gone on circling after one another the rest of the afternoon, equidistant, never drawing any closer, they might have remained unaware of one another. For Downs must have been fairly close behind him, to come upon him this quickly after, and so they would both likely have been on the same side of the promenade at any given time. But by falling out of line and coming to a halt, he had allowed Downs to overtake him, single him out. Where everyone is at rest, a moving figure is quickly noted. But where everyone is moving, it is the motionless figure that is the more conspicuous.

"Durand," Downs said with a curious matter-of-factness.

Durand tried to match it: nodded temperately, said, "You, eh ?" Try not to show any fear of him, he kept cautioning himself, try not to show any fear. Forget that she is in such terrible proximity at this very moment, or you will betray that to him by the very act of trying not to. Don't look over that way, where the shop is. Keep your eyes off it. Above all, move him around, circle him around the other way so that his back is to it. If she should happen suddenly to emerge--

"Are you alone here ?" Downs asked. The question was idly turned, but following it, for a long moment, his eyes seemed to bore into Durand's, until the latter could scarcely endure it.

"Certainly," he said somewhat testily.

Downs lazily reared one palm in protest. "No offense," he drawled. "You seem to resent my asking."

"Can you give me any reason why I should take offense at such a question ?" He realized he was speaking too quickly, almost on the verge of sputtering.

"If you cannot, then I cannot," Downs said with feigned amiability.

Durand gave the railing a slick smack of quittance, moved in away from it, drifted in an idle saunter past Downs and to the rear' of him, closed up to the railing again, and came to rest against it on a negligent elbow. Downs automatically pivoted to face him where he now was.

"And what brings you here, in turn ?" Durand said, when the adjustment had been completed.

Downs smiled with special meaning. Special meaning he, Durand, was intended to share, whether he would or not. "What brings me anywhere?" he countered. "Not a holiday, rest assured."

"Oh," was all Durand could think to say to that. A very small, limp "oh."

In the modiste shop entrance, in the middle distance, but still close enough at hand to be only too visible, a lengthwise streamer of color suddenly peered forth, as some woman, about to leave, lingered there half-in half-out in protracted farewell, probably talking to someone behind her. Durand's heart thrust hard against the cavern of his chest for a moment, like a pointed rock. Then the figure came out: tall, in blue; someone else.

His attention swerved back to Downs, to overtake what he had been about to miss. "I had heard reports," the latter was saying, "of a flashy blonde who has been creating a stir down here with some man. They even got back to New Orleans."

Durand shrugged, a little jerkily. The point of his elbow slipped a trifle on the rail top, and he had to readjust it. "There are blondes wherever there are women."

What fools we've been, he thought bitterly. Lingering on here week after week; we might have known--

"This was a flashy blonde, almost silver in her lightness," Downs took pains to elaborate, eyes on him intent and unmoving. "A fast woman, I understand."

"Someone has fooled you."

"I don't think anyone has fooled me," Downs emphasized, "because: this was not intended for my ears at all in the first place. They just happened to overhear it, to pick it up." He waited a moment. "Have you happened to note any such pair? You have been down here longer than I, I take it."

Durand looked down at the planks underfoot. "I have been cured of blondes," he murmured grudgingly.

"A relapse can occur," Downs said drily.

How did he mean that? thought Durand, startled. But--don't quarrel with it, or you will make it worse.

He took out his watch. "I must go."

"Where are you staying ?"

Durand thumbed back across his shoulder, misleadingly. "Down that way."

"I'll walk back with you to your stopping place, wherever it is," Downs offered.

He wants to find out where it is; I'll never lose him! thought Durand, harassed.

"I'm a little pressed for time," he managed to get out.

Downs smiled calmingly. "I never force myself on a man." Then he added pointedly, "That is, in sociability."

"Which way are you going ?" Durand asked suddenly,' seeing that he was about to turn and go back the other way, toward and past the modiste's. She might emerge just as he neared there--

He took Downs by the arm all at once, pressing him. As insistent now as he had been reluctant a moment ago. "Come with me, anyway. Can I offer you a schooner of beer ?"

Downs glanced overhead. "The sun is warm," he accepted. "Your own face, for instance, is quite moist." There was something faintly satiric in the way he said it, Durand thought.

They walked along side by side. At every pace Durand told himself: I've drawn him a step farther away from her. She is that much safer.

"Here's a place; let's try this," he said presently.

"I was just going to suggest it myself," Downs observed. Again there was that overtone of satire to be detected.

They went in and seated themselves at a small wicker table.

"Two Pilseners," Durand told the mustachioed, striped-shirted waiter. Then before he could withdraw again. "Where is the closet ?"

"Straight back."

Durand rose. "Excuse me for a moment." Downs nodded, ironically it seemed to him.

Durand left him seated there, went out through the spring door. He found himself in a passage. Ignoring the intermediate door to the side, he followed it to the rear, let himself out at the back of the place. He began to run like one possessed. He was possessed; possessed with the thought of saving her.

45

He ran back and forth like mad between the gaping wardrobe and the uplidded trunk, empty-armed on each trip to, half-smothered under masses of her dresses on each trip fro. He dropped them into it in any old way, so that long before the potential capacity of trunk was exhausted, its actual capacity was filled and overflowing. This was no time for a painstaking job of packing. This was get out fast, run for their lives.

He heard her come in at the street door, and before she had even had time to quit the entryway, he called down to her sight-unseen from above, in wild urgency: "Bonny!" And then again, "Bonny! Come up here quick! Hurry! I have something to tell you!"

She delayed for some reason. Perhaps over the feminine trait of removing her bonnet or disposing of her parcels before doing anything further, even at a moment of crisis.

Half mad with his own haste, he rushed recklessly out of the room, ran down to get her. And then halfway to the bottom of the stairs he stopped short, as if 'his legs had been gripped by a brake; and stood still, stock still and yet trembling, and died a little.

The figure back to door, back to just-reclosed door, equally stock still, was Downs.

Neither of them moved. The discovery came, the discovery went, the discovery was long past. Just two icy still men endlessly looking at one another. From stairs to door. From door to stairs. One of them bleakly smiling now in ultimate vindication. One of them ashen-faced, stricken to death.

One of them sighed deeply at last. Then the other sighed too, as if in answer. Two sighs in the intense silence. Two different sighs. A sigh of despair, a sigh of completion.

"You called her just now," Downs said slowly. "You called her by name. Thinking it was her. So she is here with you."

Durand had turned partly sidewise, was gripping the rail with both hands and bent slightly over it, as if able to support himself by that means alone. He shook his head. First slowly. Then at each repetition, faster, faster; until he was beating the stubborn air with it. "No," he said. "No. No. No."

"Mr. Durand, I have good ears. I heard you."

Ostrichlike, terrified, craven, trying to hide his head in the sands of his own mesmeric denial. As though to keep saying No, if persisted in long enough, would ward off the danger. Using the word as a sort of talisman.

"No. No. No!"

"Mr. Durand, let's be men at least. You called her name, you hollered it down here."

"No. No." He took a toppling step, that brought him down a stair lower. Then another. But seeming to slide his body downward along the slanted rail rather than move his legs, so hard and fast did he ding to it. Like an inebriate; which he was. An inebriate of fright. "Someone else. Woman that comes in to do my cleaning. Her name sounds like that--" He didn't know what he was saying any more.

"Very well," Downs said drily. "I'll take the woman that comes in to do your cleaning, the woman whose name sounds so much the same. I'm not hard to please."

They were suddenly wary, watchful of one another; both pairs of eyes slanting first far over to this side, then far over to that, in a sort of synchronization of wordless guile. Physical movement followed, also in complete unison.

Durand broke from the stairs, Downs broke from the door-back. Their two diagonal rushes brought them together before the mirrored, antlered hatrack cabinet against the wall, with its armed seat that was also the lid of a storage box. Durand tried to hold it down, Downs to pry it up. Downs' arm treacherously thrust in and out again, came up with the two long heliotrope streamers depending from a straw garden hat. The tip of one had been protruding, caught fast by the lid on its last closing; a fleck of color, a fingernail's worth of color, in all that vast ground-floor area of house.

("But why do you like it so?" he had once asked her.

"I don't know. It's my color, and anyone who knows me knows it's my color. Wherever I am, there's bound to be some of it around.")'

Downs let it fall back again into the box. "The costume for the woman who comes here to do your work," he remarked. And then, looking his disgust and complete forfeiture of respect at Durand, he murmured something in a swallowed voice that sounded like, "God help you, in love with a--!"

"Downs, listen, I want to talk to you--!" The words tumbled over one another in their eagerness to be out. He was so breathless he could hardly articulate. He took him by the lapels, a hand to each, held him close in a sort of pleading stricture. "Come inside here, come in the next room, let me talk to you--!"

"You and I have nothing to talk about. All my talking is for--"

Durand moved insistently backward, drawing him after him by that close coat lock, until he had him in there past the threshold where he wanted him to be. Then let him go, and Downs stayed there where he'd brought him.

"Downs, listen-- Wait a minute, there's some brandy here, let me pour you a drink."

"I keep my drinking for saloons."

"Downs, listen-- She's not here, you're making a terrible mistake-" Then quickly stilling his presumed contradiction by a fanwise rotation of the hand; "--but that isn't what I want to talk to you about. It's simply this. I--I've changed my mind. I want to drop the matter. I want the proceedings to stop."

Downs repeated with ironic absence of inflection, "You want to drop the matter. You want the proceedings to stop."

"I have that right, I have that choice. It was my complaint originally."

"As a matter of fact, that's only partly true. You were cocomplainant along with Miss Bertha Russell. But let's say for the sake of argument, it was your sole complaint originally. Then what?" His brows went up. "And what?"

"But if I withdraw the complaint, if I cancel it--?"

"You have no control over me," Downs said stonily. He slung one hip astride the arm of a chair he was standing beside, settled himself as if to wait. "You can rescind your complaint. All well and good. You can cease payment of any further fees to me. And as a matter of fact, your original retainer to me expired months ago. But you can't compel me to quit the case. Is that plain enough to you? As the old saying goes, this is a free country. And I'm a free agent. If I happen to want to continue on my own account until I bring the assignment to a satisfactory conclusion--and it happens that I do--there's nothing you can do about it. I'm no longer working for you, I'm working for my own conscience."

Appalled, Durand began to tremble all over. "But that's persecution--" he quavered.

"That's being conscientious, I'd call it, though it's not for me to say so," Downs said with a frosty smile.

"But you're not a public police official-- You have no right--"

"Fully as much right as I had in the first place, when I took up the assignment on your behalf. The only difference being that now I'll turn my findings over to them direct, when I'm ready, instead of through you."

Durand, his feet clogging, had stumbled around and to the far side of the large bulky table desk present in the room, pacing his way along its edge with both hands, as if in momentary danger of collapse.

"Now wait-- Now listen to me--" he panted, and fumbled with excruciating anxiety in the pockets of his waistcoat, one after the other, not finding the right one immediately. He brought out a key, turned it in the wood, pulled out a drawer. A moment later a compact ironbound box had appeared atop the desk, its lid standing up. He grubbed within it, came back toward Downs with both hands extended, paper money choking them.

"There's twenty thousand dollars here. Downs, open your hand. Downs, hold it a minute; just hold it a minute."

Downs' hands had retreated into his trouser pockets at his approach; there was nothing there to deposit the offering in.

Downs shook his head with indolent stubbornness. "Not a minute, not an hour, not for keeps." He switched his head commandingly. "Take it back where you got it, Durand."

"Just hold it for me," Durand persisted childishly. "Just hang onto it a moment, that's all I'm asking--"

Downs stared at him imperturbably. "You've got the wrong man, Durand. That's your misfortune. The one wrong man out of twenty. Or maybe even out of a hundred. I took the case professionally in the beginning, for a money payment. I'm on it for my own satisfaction now. I not only won't take any further money to stay on it, but no amount of money could make me quit it any more. And don't ask me why, because I can't answer you. I'm a curious johnny, that's all. You made a mistake, Durand, when you came to me in St. Louis. You should have gone to somebody else. You picked the one private investigator in the whole country, maybe, that once he starts out on something can't leave off again, not even if he wants to. Sometimes I wonder what it is myself, I wish I knew. Maybe I'm a fanatic. I want that woman, not for you any more, but for my own satisfaction." He drew his hands out of his pockets at last, but only to fold his arms ifintily across his chest and lean back still farther against the chair he was propped against.

"I'm staying here until she comes in. And I'm taking her back with me."

Durand was back beside the money box again, hands bedded atop its replaced contents, pressing down on it in strained futility.

Downs must have seen him glance speculatively toward the doorway. He read his mind.

"And if you go out of here, to try to meet her on the outside and warn her off, I'm going right along with you."

"You can't forbid me to leave my own house," Durand said despairingly.

"I didn't say that. And you can't prevent me from walking along beside you. Or just a step or two behind you. The streets are public."

Durand pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, held it there a moment, as though there were some light overhead that was too strong in his eyes. "Downs, I can raise another thirty thousand in New Orleans. Inside twenty-four hours. Go with me there, keep me in sight every step of the way; you have my promise. Fifty thousand dollars, just to let us alone. Just to forget you ever heard of--"

"Save your breath, I made my speech on that," Downs said contemptuously.

Durand clenched a fist, shook it, not threateningly, but imploringly, at him. "Why do you have to blacken her name, ruin her life? What good-- ?"

Downs' mouth shaped a laugh, but no sound came. "Blacken the name of that wanton? Ruin the life of that murdering trollop?"

The impact left physical traces across Durand's face, blanching it in livid streaks across the mouth and eyes, yet he ignored it. "She didn't do anything. The whole thing's circumstantial. She just happened to be on the same boat, that's all. So were dozens of others. You can't say for certain what happened to Julia Russell. No one can, no one knows. She just disappeared. She may have met with an accident. People have. Or she may still be alive at this very hour. She may have run off with someone else she met on the boat. All Bonny is guilty of, was passing herself off on me under another name, in the very beginning. And if I forgive her for that, as I have long ago--"

Downs suddenly left his semirecumbent position on the chair arm. He was on his feet, facing him alertly, eyes glittering now.

"Here's something you don't seem to know yet, Mr. Durand. And I think you may as well know it now, as later. You're going to soon enough, anyway. There isn't just a disappearance involved any longer. And I can say for certain just what happened to Julia Russell! I can now, if I couldn't the last time you saw me!"

He was leaning slightly forward in his intensity, in his zeal; that zeal of which he had spoken himself a few minutes earlier.

"A body drifted ashore out of the eddies at Cape Girardeau on the tenth of this month. You can get white, Mr. Durand; you have reason. A body that had been murdered, thrown into the water dead. There was no water in the lungs. I took Bertha Russell down to look at it. And badly decomposed as it was, she identified it. As that of Julia Russell, her sister. Triply fortified, even though there was no face left any more. By twin moles high on the inner side of the left thigh. That no other human being ever saw since early childhood, practically. By the uncommon fact that both end-teeth on both jaws, all four in other words, bore gold crowns. And lastly by the fact that her side bore peculiar scars in a straight line, from the teeth of a garden rake; again from her childhood. The rake had been rusty and the punctures had had to be cauterized by a hot iron."

He stopped for lack of breath, and there was a moment of silence.

Durand was standing there, head bowed, looking downward before himself. Perhaps to the floor in implicit capitulation, perhaps to the outthrust drawer from which the strongbox had come. He was breathing with difficulty; his chest rose and fell with visible labor at each intake and expulsion.

"Do the official police know about this ?" he asked finally, without raising his head.

"Not yet, but they will when I get her back there with me."

"You'll never get her back there with you, Downs. She's not going to leave this house. And neither are you."

Now his head came up. And with it the pistol his hand had fallen upon, long ago, long before this.

Shock slashed across Downs's face; it mirrored fear, collapse, panic, for a moment each, in turn; all the usual and only-human reactions. But then he curbed them, and after that he bore himself well.

He spoke for his life, but his voice was steady and reasonable, and after the first abortive step back, he held his ground sturdily. Nor did he cringe and bunch his shoulders defensively, but held himself tautly erect. He did not try to disguise his fear, but he mastered it, which is the greater bravery of the two.

"Don't do anything like that. Keep your head, man. You're still not involved. There's nothing punishable as yet in your taking up with this woman. The crime was committed before you met her. You were not a party to it. You've been foolish but not criminal so far-- Don't, Durand-- Stop and think before it's too late. For your own sake, while there's still time, put that down. Put it back where you got it."

Durand, for the first time during the entire interview, seemed to be addressing, not the investigator, but someone else. But who it was, no one could have said. He didn't know himself. "It's already too late. It's been too late since I first met her. It's been too late since the day I was born. It's been too late since God first created this world!"

He looked down, to avoid seeing Downs's face. He looked down at his own finger, curled about the trigger. Watching it with a sort of detached curiosity, as though it were not a part of him. Watching as if to see what it would do.

"Bonny," he sobbed brokenly, as though pleading with her to let him go.

The detonation stunned him briefly, and smoke drew a transient merciful curtain between the two of them. But that thinned again and was wafted aside long before it could do any good.

Then he looked up and met the face he hadn't wanted to.

Downs was' still up, strangely.

There was in his face such 'unutterable, poignant rebuke that, to have had to look at it a second time during a single lifetime would have cost Durand his reason, he had a feeling then.

A hushed word hovered about them in the sudden new stillness of the room, like a sigh of penitence. Somebody had breathed "Brother," and later Durand had the strange feeling it had been he.

Downs's legs gave abruptly, and he went with a crash. More violently, for the delay, than if he had fallen at once. And lay there dead. Dead beyond mistaking, with his eyes open but viscid opaque matter, with his lips rubbery and slightly unsealed.

The things he did then, Durand, he was slow in coming to, as though it were he and not Downs who was now in timeless eternity; and even as he did them, though he saw himself doing them, he was unaware of doing them. As though they were the acts of his hands and his body, and not of his brain.

He remembered sitting for a while on a chair, on the outermost edge of a chair, like someone uneasy, about to rise again at any moment, but yet who fails to do so. He only saw that he had been sitting when he finally did stand and quit the chair. He'd been holding the pistol in his hand the whole time, and tapping its muzzle against the cap of his knee.

He went over to the desk and returned it to where he'd taken it from. Then he noted the cash box still standing there on top the desk, with its lid up and some escaped bank notes lying about it. These he returned to it, and then closed and locked it, and then he put it away too. Then he locked the drawer and pocketed the key.

Yes, he thought dazedly, I can repair everything but one thing. There is one thing I cannot return to, what it was before. And he swayed, shuddering, for a moment against the corner of the desk, as if the thought were a strong cold wind assailing him and threatening to overbalance him.

The situation seemed timeless, as if he were going to stay in here forever with this dead man. This dead thing that had been a man; dressed like a man, but not a man any longer. He felt no immediate urge to get out of the room; instinct told him it was better to be here, behind its concealing walls, than elsewhere. But he wanted not to have to look at what' lay on the floor any longer. He wanted his eyes not to have to keep returning to it every other moment.

Downs lay upon an oblong rug, and he lay transverse upon it, so that one upper corner protruded far out past his shoulder, one lower far down below his foot. There was in this violation of symmetry, too, an irritant that continually inflamed his nerves every time his gaze fell upon the high relief offered by the floor.

He went over at last and dropped down by the dead face, and, folding over the margin of rug, covered it, as with a thick, woolly winding sheet. Then noting in himself symptoms of relief or at least amelioration, shifted rapidly down by the feet of the corpse--without standing, by working his upended feet along under his body--and turned over that corner, swathing the feet and lower legs. All that lay revealed now was a truncated torso.

Suddenly, inspired, he turned the body over, and the rug with it. And then a second time, and the rug still with it. It was gone now, completely hidden, disappeared within a cocoon of roughspun rugback. But he did it still once more, and the rug had become a long, hollow cylinder. No more than a rolled rug; nothing about it to amaze or attest or accuse.

But it was in the way. It blocked passage in or out of the doorway.

He scrambled downward upon all fours and began to roll it across the room, toward the base of the opposite wall. It rolled lumpily and a little erratically, guided by the weight of its own fill rather than his manipulations. He had to stop and straighten, and move ahead of it to get a chair out of the way.

Then, tired, when he had returned to it, he no longer got down and used his hands to it. He remained erect and planted his foot against it and prodded it forward in that way, until at last he had it close up against the wall base, and as unobtrusive as it would ever be.

A small mother-of-pearl collar button had jumped out of it en route and lay there behind it on the floor. He picked that up, and returned to it, and tossed it in freehand at one of the openings; but no longer sure which one of the two it was, whether at head or at feet.

Exhausted now, he staggered back across the room, and found the wall nearest the door-opening, the farthest one from it, and sank back deflated against that, letting it support him at shoulders and at rump. And just remained that way, inert.

He was still there like that when she came in.

Her arrival now was anticlimax. He could give it no import any longer. He was drained of nervous energy. He turned listlessly at the sound of her entrance, back beyond sight in the hall. A moment later she had arrived abreast of him, was standing looking into the room, busied in taking a glove off one hand.

A little flirt of violet scent seemed to reach him; but perhaps more imagined by the sight of her, recalled to memory from former times, than actually inhaled now.

She turned her head and saw him there, propped upright, splayed hands at a loss.

Her puckered mouth ejaculated a note of laughter. "Lou! What are you doing there like that? Flat up against--"

He didn't speak.

Her gaze swept the room in general, seeking for the answer.

He saw her glance halt at the transverse dust patch coating the floor. The rug's ghost, so to speak.

"What happened to the rug?"

"There's someone in it. There's a man's body in it." Even as he said it, it struck him how curious that sounded. There's someone in it. As though there were some miniature living being dwelling in it. But what other way was there to say it?

He turned his head to indicate it. She turned hers in accompaniment, and thus located it. A rounded shadow secretively nestling along the base of the wall; easy for the eye to miss, the legs of chairs distracting it.

"Don't go over--" he started to say. But she had already started swiftly for it. He didn't finish the injunction, more from lack of energy than because she had already disobeyed it.

He saw her crouch down by the oval, stovepipe-like opening, her skirts puddling about her. She put her face close and peered. Then she thrust her arm in, to feel blindly if there was indeed something in there. He saw her grasp it by its edges next, as if to partially unroll it, or at least stretch the aperture.

"Don't--" he said sickly. "Don't open it again."

She straightened and came back toward him again. There was an alertness in her face, a sort of wary shrewdness, but that was all; no horror and no fear, no pallor of shock. She even seemed to have gained vitality, as if this were-not a moral catastrophe-but a test to put her on her mettle.

"Who did it? You?" she demanded in a brisk whisper.

"It's Downs," he said.

Her eyes were on him with bright insistency; there was a singleminded intentness to them that almost amounted to avidity; insistency on knowing, on being told. Hard practicality. But no emotional dilution whatever.

"He came here to get you."

He wouldn't have gone ahead. His head dipped in conclusion. But she urged the continuation from him by putting hand to his chin and tipping it up again.

"He found out you were here."

She nodded now, rapidly. The explanation sufficed, that seemed to mean; she accepted it, she understood it. The act, the consequence stemming from it, was a normal one. None other could have been expected. None other could have been desired. A nod or two of her head spoke to him, saying these things.

She gripped his upper arm tight. He hadn't known she possessed so much strength, so much burning heat, in her fingers. He had the curious impression it was a form of commendation.

There was 'an intimacy tincturing her next remark, a rapport, none of their love passages had ever had before.

"What'd you do it with? What'd you take?"

"The gun there," he said. "The one in the desk."

She turned and looked at the rug. And while she stood turned thus, she struck him lightly on the chest with the back of her hand. And the only thing he could read in the gesture was rakish camaraderie, a sort of flippant, unspoken bond.

Then she looked back at him, and looked him in the face long and well. Lazily half smiling the while, as if discovering in the familiar outlines of his face, for the first time, some new qualities, to be appreciated, to be admired.

"You need a drink," she said with brittle decisiveness. "I do too. Wait a minute, I'll get us one."

He watched her go to it, and pour from the decanter twice, and put the glass stopper back in, and give it a little twist as if it were a knob.

He felt as if he were venturing into a strange new world. Which had had its well-established customs all along, but which he was only now encountering for the first time. That was what you did after you took a life; you took a drink next. He hadn't known that, it wouldn't have occurred to him, but for her. He felt like a novice in the presence of a practised hand.

She put one of the two glasses into his hand, and continuing to clasp that same hand about the wrist, as if in token of affection, poked her other hand wildly, vertically, up into the air.

"Now you're a man after my own heart," she said with glittering fervor. "Now you're worth taking up with. Now you're my kind of man."

She smote his uncertain glass with hers, and her head went back, and she pitched the liquor in through those demure lips, that scarcely seemed able to open at all.

"Here's to us," she said. "To you. To me. To the two of us. Drink up, my lovey. A short life and an exciting one."

She cast her drained glass against the wall and it sprayed into fragments.

He hesitated a moment, then, as if hurrying to overtake her, lest he be left all alone, drained his own and sent it after hers.

46

The eye, falling upon them unwarned half an hour later, would have mistaken them for a pretty picture of domesticity; discussing some problem of meeting household expense, perhaps, or of planning the refurnishing of a room.

He sat now, legs outspread, head lolling back, in a chair with arms, and she sat perched on one of the arms of it, close beside him, her hand occasionally straying absently to his hair, as they mulled and talked it over.

He had been holding a glass, a succeeding one, in his hand. She took it away from him at last and placed it on the table. "No more of that just now," she admonished, and patted him on the head. "You. must keep your head clear for this."

"It's hopeless, Bonny," he said wanly.

"It's nothing of the sort." Again she patted him on the head. "I've been--"

She didn't finish it, but somehow he guessed what she'd been about to say. I've been in situations like this before. He wondered where, he wondered when. He wondered who had done it, who she'd been with at the time.

"To run flying out of here," she resumed, as if taking up a discussion that had been allowed to lapse some little time before, "would be the most foolhardy thing people in--our position--could do." As if hearing her from a great distance, he was amazed at how prim, how mincing, her words sounded; as if she were a pretty young schoolmistress patiently instructing a not-very-bright pupil in his lesson. She should have had some embroidery on her lap, and her eyes downcast to it as she spoke, to match her tone of voice.

"We can't stay, Bonny," he faltered. "What are we going to do? How can we stay?" And hid his eyes for a moment behind his own hand. "It's already an hour."

"How long was it before I came home ?" she asked with an almost scientific detachment.

"I don't know. It seemed like a long time-" He started up rebelliously from the chair. "We could have been far from here, already. We should have been!"

She pressed him gently but firmly back.

"We're not staying," she calmed him. "But we're not rushing off helter-skelter either, at the drop of a hat. Don't you know what that would mean? In a few hours at most, someone would have found it out, be on our heels."

"Well, they will anyway!"

"No they won't. Not if we play our cards right. We'll go in our own good time. But that comes last of all, when we're good and ready for it. The first thing is--" she hooked her thumb negligently across the room, "--that has to be got out of the way."

"Taken outside the house?" he suggested dubiously.

She gnawed her lips reflectively. "Wait, let me think a minute." At last she shook her head, said slowly: "No, not outside-- We'd be seen. Almost certainly."

"Then--?"

"Somewhere inside," she said, with a slight motion of her shoulders, as though that were to be understood, went without saying.

The idea horrified him. "Right here in the house--?"

"Of course. It's a lot safer. In fact, it's the only thing for us to do. We're here alone, just the two of us; no servants. We can take all the time we need--"

"Ugh," he groaned.

She was pondering again, worrying her lip; she seemed to have no time for emotion. She frightened him almost as much as the fact they were trying to conceal.

"One of the fireplaces ?" he faltered. "There are two large ones down on this floor--"

She shook her head. "That would only be a matter of days."

"A closet ?"

"Worse. A matter of hours." She stretched her foot out and tapped down her heel a couple of times. Then she nodded, as if she were at last nearing a satisfactory decision. "One of the floors."

"They're hardwood. It would be noticed the minute anyone came into the room."

"The cellar. What's the floor of that like ?"

He couldn't recall having seen it; had never been down there, to his knowledge.

She quitted the chair abruptly. The period of incubation had ended, the period of action had begun. "Wait a minute. I'll go down take a look." From the doorway, without turning her head, she warned: "Don't take any more of those drinks while I'm gone."

She came running back, squinting shrewdly. "Hard dirt. That'll do."

She had to think for the two of them. She pulled at him briskly by the shoulder. "Come on, let's get it down there awhile. It's better than leaving it up here until we're ready. Someone may come to the door in the meantime."

He went over to it and stopped, trying to quell the nausea assailing his stomach.

She had to think of everything. "Hadn't you better take your coat off? It'll hamper you."

She took it from him and draped it carefully over a chair back, so that it would not wrinkle. She even brushed a little at one of the sleeves for a moment, before letting it be.

He wondered how such a commonplace, everyday act, her helping him off with his coat, could seem so grisly to him, making him quail to his marrow.

He took it up by its middle, the furled rug, packed it underarm, clasping it overarm with his other. One end, where the feet presumably were, of necessity slanted and dragged on the floor, of its own weight. The other end, where the head was, he managed to keep upward.

He advanced a few paces, draggingly. Suddenly the weight had eased, the lower end had lost its restraining drag on the floor. He looked, and she was holding that for him, helping him.

"No, for God's sake, no!" he said sickly. "Not you--"

"Oh, don't be a fool, Louis," she answered impatiently. "It's a lot quicker this way!" Then she added, with somewhat less asperity, "It's just a rug to me. I can't see anything."

They traveled with it out of the room, and along the cellarward passage to its back. Then had to stop and set it down, while he opened the door. Then in through there, and down the stairs, to cellar bottom. Then set it down once more, for good.

He was breathing hard. He passed his hand over his forehead.

"Heavy," she agreed. She blew out her breath, with a slight smile.

All the little things she did horrified him so. His blood almost turned cold at that.

They picked a place for it against the wall. She used the sharp toe of her shoe to test several, kicking and prodding at them, before settling on it. "I think this is about the best. It's a little less compact here."

He picked up a piece of rotting, discarded timber, broke it over his upthrust knee to obtain a sharp point.

"You're not going to do it with that, are you? It would take you the live-long night!" There was almost a hint of risibility in her voice, inconceivable as that was to him.

He drove it into the hard-packed floor, and it promptly broke a second time, proving its worthlessness.

"It'll take a shovel," she said. "Nothing else will do."

"There's none down here."

"There's none anywhere in the house. We'll have to bring one in." She started up the steps. He remained standing there. She turned at their top and beckoned him. "I'll go out and get it," she said. "You're kind of shaky yet, I can see that. Don't stay down there while I'm gone, it'll make you worse. Wait upstairs for me."

He followed her up, closed the cellar door after him.

She put on her poke bonnet, threw a shawl over her shoulders, as if it were the merest domestic errand she were going upon.

"Do you think it's prudent ?" he said.

"People buy shovels, you know. There need be no harm in that. It's all in the way you carry it off."

She went toward the outside door, and he trailed behind her.

She turned to him there. "Keep your courage up, honey." She held his chin fast, kissed him on the lips.

He'd never known a kiss could be such a gruesome thing before.

"Stay up here, away from it," she counselled. "And don't go back to that liquor." She was like a conscientious mother giving a small boy last minute injunctions, putting him on his good behavior, before leaving him to himself.

The door closed, and he watched her for a moment through its pane. Saw her go down the front walk, just like any bustling little matron on a housewifely errand. She was even diligently stroking her mittens on as she turned up the road and went from sight.

He was left alone with his dead.

He sought the nearest room at hand, not the one in which it had happened, and collapsed into a chair, and huddled there inert, his face pressed inward against its back, and waited for her to return.

It seemed hours before she did. And it must, in truth, have been the better part of one.

She brought it in with her. She was carrying it openly--but then how else was she to have carried it? Its bit was wrapped in brown paper, tied with a string. The stick protruded unconcealed.

"Was I long?"

"Forever," he groaned.

"I deliberately went out of my way," she explained. "I didn't want to buy it too near here, where we're known by sight."

"It was a mistake to get it at all, don't you think?"

She gave him a confident smirk. "Not in the way I did it. I did not ask to buy a shovel at all. It was his advice that I buy one. What I asked was what implement he could suggest my using to cultivate in the space behind our house, whether a spade or a rake. I was dubious of a shovel; it took all his persuasion to convince me." She wagged her head cocksurely.

And she could stand there and dicker; he thought, incredulous.

He took it from her.

"Shall I come down with you?" she offered, carefully removing her bonnet with both hands, replacing the pins in it, and setting it down meticulously so that its shape would not suffer.

"No," he said in a stifled voice. To have had her watch him would have been an added horror, for some reason, that he could not have borne. "I'll let you know when--I've done."

She gave him helpful last minute instructions. "Mark it off first. You know, how long and how wide you'll want it. With the tip of the shovel. That'll keep you from doing more work than is needful."

His silent answer to this was the reflex of retching.

He closed the door after him, went down the steps.

The lamp was still burning where they'd left it before.

He turned it up higher. Then that was too bright, it showed him too much; he quickly moderated it a little.

He'd never dug a grave before.

He marked it off first, as she'd told him. He drove the shovel into the marked-off space and left it, standing upright of its own weight. He rolled his shirt sleeves up out of the way.

Then he took up the shovel and began.

The digging part was not so bad. It was behind him, out of sight, while he was at it. Horror, though it did not disappear altogether, was kept to a minimum. It might have been just a necessary trench or pit he was digging.

But then when he was through--

It took him some moments to work himself up to the necessary pitch of resoluteness. Then suddenly he walked rapidly over to it, from the far side of the cellar, where he'd withdrawn and kept his back to it in the interim.

He dragged the rug over, placed it even with the waiting cavity's edge. Then, taking a restraining hold along its exposed flap, he pushed the rounded part from him. It unrolled and emptied itself into the trough, with no more than a sodden thump. Then he drew it up. It came back to him again facilely unweighted. An arm flung up for a moment, but quickly dropped back again.

He avoided looking into it. He stepped around it to the other side, where the mound of disinterred fill was, and, holding his face averted, began to push and scrape that down into it with the back of the shovel.

Then when at last he had to look, to see how far he had progressed, the worst was over. There was no longer any face down there to confront him. There was just a fragmentary midsection seeming to float there on the surface, as it were; peering through the surrounding film of earth.

Then that went, presently.

"And all God's work has come to this," passed through his mind.

He had to tramp and stamp on it, at the end, to firm it down. That part was bad too.

He kept it up far longer than was needful. As if to keep what lay under from ever coming out again. He almost seemed to be doing a jig of fear and despair, unable to quit of his own volition.

He looked up suddenly.

She was standing there at head of the steps watching him.

"How did you know just when?" he panted, haggard.

"I came down twice to see how far along you were. I went back again without disturbing you. I thought perhaps you'd best be left alone." She looked at him inscrutably. "I didn't think you'd be able to go through with it to the finish. But you did, didn't you?" Whether that was praise or not, he couldn't tell.

He kicked the shovel out of his path, tottered up the steps toward her.

He fell before he'd quite reached her. Or rather, let himself fall. He lay there, extended on the step, face buried in one arm, and sobbed a little.

She bent over toward him. Her hand came down upon his shoulder, consolingly.

"There, now. It's over. It's done. There's nothing more to worry about."

"I've killed a man," he said smotheredly. "I've killed a man. God has forbidden that."

She gave a curt, humorless snuff of laughter. "Soldiers in a battle kill them by the tens and never give it a second thought. They even give them medals for it."

She plucked at him by the arm, until he had found his feet again, stood beside her.

"Come, let's get out of here."

She stepped down there a moment to get the lamp, which he had forgotten, bring it with her, put it out. Then she closed the door after the two of them. She brushed her fingertips off fastidiously, against each other; no doubt from having touched the lamp. Or perhaps--

She put her arm comfortingly about his waist, as she rejoined him. "Come upstairs to bed. You're worn out. It's nearly ten o'clock, did you know that? You've been down there four full hours."

"You mean--?" He didn't think he'd heard her aright. "Sleep here in this same house tonight ?"

She cast up her hand, as if at the nonsense of such a qualm. "It's late. What trains are there any more? And even if there were, people don't bolt out suddenly in the middle of the night. That would give them something to--"

"But knowing, as we do, Bonny. Knowing all the time, you and I both, what lies-"

"Don't be childish. Just put it from your mind. It's all the way down in the cellar. We're-all the way up in the bedroom."

She tugged at him until she got him to climb beside her.

"You're like a little boy who's afraid of the dark," she mocked.

He said nothing more.

In the lamplit bedroom he watched her covertly, while apathetically, with numbed motions, drawing off his own things. There was no difference to be detected in the bustling routine with which she prepared herself for retirement, from any other night. Again certain under-layers of garments billowed up over her head in as much armless commotion as ever. Again the petticoats dropped to the floor and she stepped aside from them, one after the other. Again her unbound hair was trapped first on the inside of her high-collar flannel gown, then freed and brought to the outside, with a little backward shake. Every move was normal, unforced.

She even sat to the mirror and stroked her hair with the brush.

He lay back and closed his eyes, with a weazened sickish feeling.

They didn't say goodnight to one another. She perhaps thought he was already asleep, or was a little offended at his excess of morality. He was glad of that, at least. Glad she didn't try to kiss him. He had a curious sensation for a moment or two, that if she had tried, he would have, involuntarily, reared up, run for the window, and hurled himself through it.

She turned their bedside lamp and the room dimmed indigo.

He lay there motionless, as rigid, as extended, as what he had put into the trough down below in the cellar awhile ago.

Not only couldn't he sleep, he was afraid to sleep. He wouldn't have let himself if he could have. He was fearful of meeting the man he had just slain, should he drift across the border.

She too was sleepless, however, in spite of all her insouciance. He heard her turning about a number of times. Presently, she gave a foreshortened sigh of impatience. Then he heard the bed frame jar slightly as she propped herself up on her arm.

He could somehow tell, in another moment, that she was leaning over toward him. The direction of her breath, perhaps, coming toward him.

Her silken whisper reached him.

"Awake, Lou ?"

He kept his eyes closed.

He heard her get up, the rustle as she put something over her. Heard her take up the lamp, tread softly from the room with it, unlighted. Then outside the door, left ajar, the slowly burgeoning glow as she lit it. Then this receded as she bore it down the stairs with her.

His breath started to quicken. Was she leaving him? Was she about to commit some act of disloyalty, of betrayal, in the depths of night? Terrified, he suddenly burst the frozen mould that had encased him, started up himself, flung something on, crept cautiously out into the hail.

He could see the light from below peering wanly up the stairs. He could hear a faint sound now and again, as she moved softly about.

He felt his way down the stairs, step by step, his breath erratic, and rearward toward where the light was coming from. Then stepped up to the doorway at last and confronted her.

She was seated at the table, in the lamplight, holding a chickenjoint in her hand and busily gnawing at it.

"I was hungry, Lou," she said sheepishly. "I didn't have any supper." And then, putting her hand to the vacant chair beside her and swiveling it out invitingly, "Join me?"

47

The gentle but insistently repeated pressure of her small hand on his shoulder, rubbed sleep threadbare, wore it away. He started upward spasmodically.

Then it came back. Then he remembered. Like a waiting knife it struck and found him.

"I'm going to get the tickets, Lou. Lou, wake up, it's after ten. I'm going to get the tickets. For us, at the station. I've done all the packing, while you were lying there. I've left out your one suit, everything else is put away--Lou, wake up, clear your eyes. Can't you understand me? I'm going to get the tickets. What about money ?"

"Over there," he murmured vacantly, eyes turned inward on yesterday. "Back pocket, on the left side-"

She had it in a moment, as though she'd already known, but only wanted his cognizance to her taking it.

"Where will I get them for? Where do you want us to go ?"

"I don't know--" he said blurredly, shading his eyes. "I can't tell you that--"

She gave her head a little toss of impatience at his sluggishness. "I'll go by the trains, then. Whichever one is leaving soonest, we'll take."

She came to him and, bending, gave him a hurried little peck of parting. The fragrance of her violet toilet water swirled about him.

"Be careful," he said dismally. "It may be dangerous."

"We have time. There's no danger yet. How can there be? It's not even known." She gave him a shrug of assurance. "If we go about it right, there may never be danger."

The froufrou of her skirts crossed the floor. She opened the door. She turned there. She bent the fingers of her hand as if beckoning him to her.

"Ta ta," she said. "Lovey mine."

48

She seemed to be gone the whole morning. How could it take that long just to buy tickets for a train? he asked himself over and over again, sweating agony. How? How? Even if you bought them twice over, three times over?

He was pacing endlessly back and forth, holding tightly clasped between his two hands, as if afraid to lose it, a cup of the coffee she had left for him warming on the stove. But the plume of steam that had at first, with a sort of rippling sluggishness, traced his course behind him on the air, had long since thinned and vanished. He took a hurried swallow every so often, but dipping his mouth nervously down into the cup, held low as it was, rather than raising it to his lips. He wasn't aware of its taste, or of its degree of warmth, or even what it was.

She wasn't coming back, that was it. She'd abandoned him, boarded a train by herself, left him to meet the consequences of his own act as best he might. Sweat would start out anew at the thought, sweat that hurt like blood, though it was only the dew of fear. Then he would remember that she had, intentionally awakened him before leaving, that she would have carefully avoided that above all had desertion been her purpose, and he'd breathe again and his misgivings would abate somewhat. Only to return again presently, stronger than ever, as if on a wicked punishing spiral.

He was in the midst of this inner turmoil, when suddenly, on the outside, crisis confronted him, and he was alone to face it.

There was a knocking at the door that he knew could not possibly be hers, and when he peered from one of the sideward frontal windows, cloaking his face with the edge of the drape, there was a coach and coachman standing waiting empty out before the house for someone.

The rapping came again. And when he drew nearer, through the inside of the house, and stole a frightened look out from mid-hall toward the glass curtain veiling the upper part of the door, there were the filmy shadowed busts of a man and a woman imprinted on it, standing waiting on the threshold.

Side by side, in chiaroscuro; the cone of a man's tophat, the slanting line of a woman's bonnet brim.

The knocking repeated itself, and seemed to trap his voice into issuing forth, against every intent of his own to use it. "Who's there ?" Too late he tried to stem it, to recall it, but it was already gone.

"Dollard," a man's voice answered, deeply resonant.

He didn't know the name, couldn't identify it.

Unmanned, he quailed there.

The voice came again. "May I speak with you a minute, Mr. Durand ?"

So the voice knew him at least. It was no mistake, it was he that was wanted.

He would have been incapable of further movement, even after having revealed himself, had they let him be.

But his name came again. "Mr. Durand." And then the knocking, puzzled now and questioning. And then his name again. "Mr. Durand. Hello! Mr. Durand ?"

He was drawn to it as if in a trancelike condition, and unbolted, and drew it back.

They flamed instantly into full color, from the pewter silhouettes they had been, and into full stature, from the shoulder busts.

The woman was dark haired, sallow skinned, rather thin of face but pretty nonetheless; wearing a costume of grape velveteen, adorned with black frogs across the bodice like a hussar's jacket. The man was florid of face, with a copper walrus mustache drooping over the corners of his mouth, a cane handle riding over the crook of his arm, and a shirt front with small blue forget-me-nots patterned all over it.

He raised his hat to Durand, in deference to his companion, and revealed the crown of his head to be somewhat bald, and also somewhat sunburned.

Durand didn't recognize him for a minute.

"I'm Dollard, the agent from whom you rented the house."

He waited, ready to smile at the expected acknowledgement, but there was none.

"Mrs. Durand tells me you are unexpectedly called away and the house will be available."

She had been there then. She had even thought of that.

"Oh," he said stupidly. "Oh. Oh, yes. Of course."

Dollard gave him a somewhat quizzical look, as if unable to understand his lack of immediate comprehension. "That is correct, isn't it ?"

"Yes," he said, realizing he'd already blundered copiously in the moment or two since he'd appeared at the door.

"Have I your permission to show this possible client through the house?"

"Now?" he murmured aghast. He could almost feel his chest pucker, as if closing up for lack of oxygen.

Dollard seemed to miss the intonation, having suddenly remembered his best business manners. "Oh, forgive me. Mrs. mayer, may I present Mr. Durand?"

He saw the young woman glance at the forgotten coffee cup his hand still clung to, as if it were some kind of a chalice with mystic powers to save him. "I'm afraid we may have come at an unfortunate time," she suggested deprecatingly., "We're disturbing Mr. Durand. Should we not perhaps come back at another time, Mr. Dollard?"

The agent had already deftly inserted himself on the inside, however, and since he refused to return to her, she had to follow somewhat hesitantly to where he was, even in the act of speaking.

"I know how upset everything is when a move is contemplated; the packing and all," she apologized.

"I'm sure Mr. Durand doesn't mind," Dollard said. "We won't be very long." And since he had unobtrusively managed to close the door after the three of them by this time, the fact was already an accomplished one.

They moved down the hall parallel to one another, the young woman in the middle; Dollard striding with heavy-footed assurance, Durand all but tottering.

"This is the hall. Notice how spacious it is." Dollard swept his arm up, like an opera tenor on a high note.

"The light is quite good too," agreed the young woman.

Dollard tapped his cane. "The finest hardwood parquetry. You don't always find it."

They advanced after the momentary halt.

"Now, in here is the parlor," Dollard proclaimed grandly, again with a sweep.

"Is the furniture yours, Mr. Durand?" she asked.

Dollard's answer overrode whatever one he might have brought himself to make, sparing him the necessity. "The furniture goes with the house," he stated flatly.

She nodded her head approvingly. "This is quite a nice room. Yes, it's quite nice."

She had already turned her shoulder to it, about to lead them on elsewhere, and Dollard had turned in accord with her. When suddenly, as if only now struck by something he had already observed a moment ago, he looked back, pointed unexpectedly with his cane.

"Shouldn't there be a rug here?"

The dust patch was suddenly the most conspicuous thing in the room. In the house, in the whole world. It glowed livid, as if limned with phosphorus. To Durand, at least, it almost appeared incandescent, and he felt sure they must see it that way too. He could feel his face bleaching and drawing taut over the cheekbones, as if the slack of his skin were being pulled at the back of his head by some cruel hand.

"Where ?" he managed to utter.

Dollard's cane tapped down twice, for irritated emphasis. "Here. Here."

"Oh," Durand said pitifully, crumbling phrases in a play for time. "Oh, there--Oh, yes-I think you're-I'd have to ask my--" Then suddenly he'd regained command of himself, and his tone was firm, though still brittle. "It was removed to be beaten out. I remember now."

"Then it's outdoors ?" Dollard queried, as though not wholly pleased. Without waiting to be answered, he crossed to one of the windows, lowered his head to avoid the interplay of the curtains, and swept his gaze about. "No, I fail to see it there." He turned his head back to Durand, as if uneasily asking reassurance.

The latter's eyelids, which had closed for a moment over some inner illness of his own, went up again in time to meet the agent's boring glance.

"It's safe," he said. "It's somewhere about the house. Just where, I couldn't exactly--"

"It was quite valuable," Dollard said. "I trust it hasn't been stolen. It will have to be accounted for, of course."

"It will be," Durand breathed almost inaudibly.

The young woman shifted her foot slightly, in forebearing reminder that she was being detained; this instantly succeeded in recalling his present duties to Dollard, and he dropped the topic.

He hastened back to her, and tipped two fingers to her elbow in courtly guidance. "Shall we continue, Mrs. Thayer? Next I would like you to see the upstairs."

They ascended in single file, she in the lead, Durand at the rear. They ascended slowly, and he seemed to feel each footfall imprinted on his heart, as though it were that they were treading upon. The rustle and hiss of her multiple skirts was like the sound of volatile water rushing down a wooden trough, though it flowed the other way, upward instead of down.

"You will notice the excellent light that is obtained throughout this house," Dollard preened himself, as soon as they were on level flooring once more. He hooked his thumbs to the armholes of his waistcoat, allowed his fingers to trip contentedly against his chest. "In here, an extra little sitting room for the lady of the house. To do her sewing, perhaps." He smiled benevolently, winked at Durand behind her back, as though to show him he knew women, knew what pleased them.

He was in fine fettle today, apparently; enjoying every moment of his often-performed duties. Durand remembered enjoyment, an academic word from the vague past; remembered the word, but not its sensation. His wrists felt as cold as though tight coils of wire were cutting into their flesh, had long since stopped all circulation.

At their bedroom door she balked, chastely withdrew the tentative foot she had put forward, as soon as she had identified it for what it was.

"And this room has a most desirable outlook," Dollard orated heedlessly. "If you will be good enough to go in--"

Her eyes widened in dignified, gravely offered reproach. "Mr. Dollard!" she reminded him firmly. "There is a bed in there. And my husband is not accompanying me."

"Oh, your pardon! Of course!" he protested elaborately, with recessive genuflections. "Mr. Durand?"

The two men delicately withdrew all the way up-hall to the stairhead, to wait for her, and with the impurity of mixed company thus removed, she proceeded to enter the room and inspect it at her leisure.

"A real lady," Dollard commented admiringly under his breath, punctiliously looking the other way so that even his eyes could not seem to follow her on her unchaperoned expedition.

Durand's hand lay draggingly on his collar, forgotten there since he had last tried to ease his throat some moments ago.

She came out again very shortly. Her color was a trifle higher than when she had gone in, since the bed had not been made up, but she had no comment to offer.

They descended again, in the same order in which they had gone up. Her undulating hand left the railing at the bottom, and she turned to Dollard.

"Have you shown me everything ?"

"I believe so." Perhaps judging her to be not yet wholly convinced of the house's desirability, he groped for additional inducements to display to her, turned his head this way and ' that. "All but the cellar--"

Durand could feel a sharp contraction go through his middle, almost like a cramp. He resisted the instinctive urge to clutch at himself and bend forward.

Their eyes were not on him, fortunately; they were looking back there toward where its door was, Dollárd's gaze having led her own to it.

"It is quite a large and commodious one. Let me show you. It will only take a moment--"

They turned and paced toward it.

Durand, clinging for a necessary moment to the newel post of the banister, released it again and took a faulty step after them.

His mind was suddenly spinning, casting off excuses for delaying them like sparks from a whirring whetstone. Rats, say there are rats; she will be afraid--Cobwebs, dust; she may harm her clothes--

"There is no light," he said hoarsely. "You will not be able to see anything. I'm afraid Mrs. Thayer may hurt herself--"

His tone was both too abrupt and too raucous for the intimate little elbow passage that now confined them all. Both turned their heads in surprise at the intensity of voice he had used, as though they were at a far greater distance. But then immediately, they seemed to take no further notice of the aberration, beyond that.

"No light in your cellar ?" said Dollard with pouting dissatisfaction. "You should have a light in your cellar. What do you do when you wish to go down there yourself ?" And glancing about him in mounting peevishness at thus being balked, his gaze suddenly struck the lamp which had been put down close by the doorframe by one of the two of them, Bonny or himself--Durand could no longer remember which it was--on coming up the night before.

Again he died inwardly, as he'd been dying at successive intervals for the past half-hour or more. He'd chosen the wrong preventative; it should have been rats or dust.

"No light, you said?" Dollard exclaimed, brows peaked. "Why, here's a lamp right here. What's this?"

All he could stammer in a smothered voice was: "My wife must have set it there- There was none last time- I remember complaining--"

Dollard had already picked it up, hoisted the chimney. He struck a match to it, recapped it, and it glowered yellow; to Durand like the fuming, imprisoned apparition of a baleful genie, called into being to destroy him.

He thought, Shall I turn and run from the house? Shall I turn and run out through the door? Why do I stand here like this, looking over their shoulders, waiting for them to--? And badly as he wanted to turn and flee, he found he couldn't; his feet seemed to have adhered to the floor, he found he couldn't lift them.

Dollard had opened the cellarway door. He stepped through onto the small stage that topped the stairs, and then downward a step or two. A pale yellow wash from the lamp, like something alive, lapped treacherously ahead of him, down the rest of the steps, and over the flooring, and even up the cellar walls, but growing fainter and dimmer the greater its distance from him, until it finally lost all power to reveal.

He went down a step or two more, and stretching out his arm straight before him, slowly circled it around, so that it kindled all sides of the place, even if only transiently.

"There are built-in tubs," he said, "for the family's washing, and a water boiler that can be heated by wood to supply you with--"

He descended farther. He was now all but at the foot of the stairs. Mrs. Thayer had come out onto the stage above, was holding her skirts tipped from the ground as a precaution. Durand, his own breath roaring and drumming in his ears, was gripping the doorframe with both hands, one above the other, head and shoulders thrust forward around it.

Dollard extended his hand upward in her direction. "Would you care to come down farther?"

"I believe I can see it from here," Mrs. Thayer said.

To accommodate her, he reversed the lamp, swinging it back again the other way. As its reflected gleam coursed past the place, an oblong darker than the rest of the flooring, a patch, a foursquare stain or shadow, seemed to shoot out into its path, then recede again as the heart of the glow swept past. It was as sudden as though it had moved of its own accord; as mobile, due to the coursingpast of the lamp, as a darkling mat suddenly whisked out, then snatched back again. There, then gone again.

It sent a shock through him that congested his heart and threatened to burst it. And yet they seemed not to have seen it, or if they had, not to have known it for what it was. Their eyes hadn't been seeking it as his had, perhaps.

Dollard suddenly hoisted the lamp upward, so that it evened with his head, and peered forward. A little over from the place, though, not quite at it.

"Why, isn't that the rug from the upstairs room we were just speaking of ?" He quitted the bottom steps, crossed toward it.

Again that deeper-tinted strip sidled forward, this time under his very feet. He stopped directly atop it, both feet planted on it, bending forward slightly toward the other object nearby that had his attention. "How does it come to be down here? Do you beat out your rugs in the cellar, Mr. Durand?"

Durand didn't utter a sound. He couldn't recall if there had been any blood marks on the rug. All he could think of was that.

Mrs. Thayer tactfully came to his aid.

"I do that myself at times. When it's raining outdoors one has to. In any case I'm sure Mr. Durand doesn't attend to that himself, in person." She smiled pacifyingly from one to the other of them.

"One can wait until after it's stopped raining," Dollard grumbled thickly in his throat. "Besides, it hasn't rained all week long, that I can recall--" But he didn't pursue the stricture any further for the present.

A second later Durand was watching him stoop to recover the rug in his arms, lift it furled as it was, and turn toward the stairs bearing it with him crosswise in front of him, to return it to where it belonged. He perhaps wanted to avoid contaminating it further by spreading it open on the dusty cellar floor.

But the light would be better upstairs. And Durand's breath was hot against the roof of his mouth, like something issuing from a brick oven. He couldn't have formed words even if he'd had any to produce. They drew back one on each side to give Dollard passage, Mrs. Thayer with a graceful little retraction, Durand with a vertiginous stagger that fortunately seemed to escape their notice, or if not, to be ascribed to no more than a masculine maladroitness in maneuvering in confined spaces.

Then they turned and followed the rug-bearer back to the rear sitting room, Durand paying his way with hand to wall, unseen, like a lame man.

"That could have waited, Mr. Dollard," the young matron said.

"I know, but I wanted you to see this room at its best."

Dollard gave the unsecured edge of the rug a fine upward fling, let it fall, paid it out, shuffling backward to give it its full spread on the floor.

Something flew out as he did so. Something small, indeterminate. The eye could catch its leap, but not make out what it was. The wooden flooring offside clicked with its relapse.

Dollard stooped, and pinched with two fingers at a place where there was nothing to be seen. At least not from where the other two people in the room stood. Then he straightened with it, whatever it was, came toward Durand with it.

"This is yours, I presume," he said, looking him straight in the eye. "One of your collar buttons, Mr. Durand."

He thrust it with a little peck, point first, into Durand's reluctantly receptive palm, and the latter closed his fingers over it. It was warm yet from Dollard's hand, but to Durand it seemed to be warm yet from Downs's throat. It felt like the nail of a crucifix going straight through the flesh of his palm, and he almost expected to see a drop of blood come stealing through the tight crevice of his fingers.

"Mr. Thayer is always dropping them about our house," put in the friendly Mrs. Thayer, in an effort to salve what she took to be his mortification at this public exposure, in her presence, of one of the necessary fastenings of his intimate apparel. Thinking that men were like women in that respect, and that if some safety pin or other similar clasp had been lost from her own undergarb, she too might very well have had that look of consternation on her face and confusedly sought support from the back of a chair, as she saw him do now.

"Hnh!" grunted Dollard, as if to say: I don't; only a sloven does.

But he returned to the rug, smoothing out its ripples now with strokes of his foot.

Durand thrust the token deep into his pocket. A burning sensation, coming through his clothes, stayed with it. He beheld them swayingly through thick-lensed, fear-strained eyes. He wondered if, to them, he appeared to 'sway, as they did to him. Apparently not, for their expressions showed no sudden attention nor undue concern whenever they were momentarily cast his way.

"I think I've shown you everything," Dollard said at last.

"Yes, I think you have," his prospective client agreed.

They sauntered now toward the front door, Durand like a wraith faltering beside them. He had the door at last to cling to, and any see-saw vagary of balance could be ascribed to the flux of its hinges.

Mrs. Thayer turned toward him, smiled. "Thank you very much; I hope we haven't disturbed you."

"Good day," said Dollard, with an economy of urbanity that, from his point of view, it would have been a waste to use on people who were about to cease being lessees of the property.

He escorted her down to the carriage, helped her in, talking assiduously the while in an effort to persuade her into concluding the transaction. He was just about to step in after her and drive off with her--to Durand's unutterable relief--when suddenly Bonny appeared, walking rapidly along the sidewalk, and turned in toward the house, glancing back toward them as she did so.

Durand widened the door, to admit her and close it after her, but she stopped there, blocking it.

"For God's sake," he said exhaustedly, "get in here--I'm halfdead."

"Just a moment," she said, immovable. "He can't rent this place unless we sign a release. Did you give him the keys yet ?"

"No."

"Good," she said crisply. To his horror, she raised her arm and beckoned Dollard back. She even called out his name. "Mr. Dollard! Just a moment, if you will!"

"Don't call him back," pleaded Durand. "Let him go, let him go. What are you thinking of ?"

"I know what I'm doing," she said firmly.

Durand, aghast, saw the agent reluctantly descend, come back toward them again. He chafed his hands propitiously. "I think I have the transaction concluded," he confided. "And at a considerably better figure. Her mind is all but made up."

The remark brought a shrewd glint of calculation into Bonny's eyes, Durand saw.

"Yes?" she said dulcetly. "But there are a couple of things you've forgotten, aren't there? The keys, and the signed release."

Dollard fumbled hastily for his pocket. "Oh, so I have. But I have the form right here on me, and if you'll give me the keys now, that will save me a trip back for them later--" He glanced around at the waiting carriage. He was as anxious to be off, or nearly so, as Durand was anxious to have him be.

Bonny, however, seemed to be in no hurry. She intercepted the paper, which Dollard had been extending toward Durand, and consulted it herself. She studiously ignored the mute, frantic appeal in Durand's dilated eyes. He mopped furtively at his forehead.

She raised her head; then with no sign of returning the paper to Dollard, tapped it questioningly against her arched pulse.

"And what of the unused portion of our rental fee? I see no mention here-"

"The unused--? I don't understand you."

She retained the paper against his tentatively extended hand seeking to reclaim it. "The rental for this month has already been paid."

"Naturally."

"But today is only the tenth. What of the three weeks we relinquish?"

"You forfeit that. I cannot return it to you once it has been paid."

"Very well," she said waspishly. "But then neither can you rent it to anyone else until after the thirtieth of the month. You had best go and tell the lady that, and spare her a disappointment."

Dollard's mouth dropped slack, astounded. "But you are not going to be here! You leave today. It was you yourself who came to me this morning to tell me so." He glanced helplessly at the carriage, where the waiting Mrs. Thayer was beginning to show ladylike signs of impatience. She looked over at him inquiringly, she coughed pantomimically--unheard at that distance--into the hollow of her hand. "Come, be reasonable, madam. You said yourself--"

Bonny was adamant. There was even a small smile etched into the corner of her mouth. Her eyes, as if guessing the surreptitious, agonized signs Durand was trying to convey to her from behind the turn of the agent's shoulder, refused to look across at him. "You be reasonable, Mr. Dollard. My husband and I are not going to make you a present of the greater part of a month's rental. Our departure can very well be postponed in such a case. Either you return it to us, or we stay until the first of the new month."

She deliberately turned and entered the hallway. She stopped before the mirror. In full view of Dollard, she raised hands to her bonnet, removed it. She adjusted her hair, to make sure it was not disturbed.

"Close the door, dear," she said to Durand. "And then come upstairs and help me unpack our things. Good day, sir," she added pointedly to Dollard.

The agent looked apprehensively at the carriage, to gauge how much longer he might dare keep it waiting. Then to her; she was now moving toward the stairs, as if about to ascend them. Then, more quickly, to the carriage. Then, more quickly still, to her once more. The carriage, at least, was standing still, but she wasn't.

At last he blundered into the house after her, past the-by this time-almost audibly moaning Durand. "Just a moment!" he capitulated. "Very well; seventy-five dollars by the month. I will give you the amount for the last two weeks. Thirty-seven, fifty."

Bonny turned, gave him a granite smile, shook her head. Then she continued, put her foot to the bottommost step, her hand to the newel-post. "Today is not the fifteenth of the month. Today is the tenth. We have had the use of this house for only one third of the time paid for. Therefore there is two thirds coming to us. Fifty dollars."

"Madam!" said Dollard, striking hand to his scalp, forgetful that there was no longer hair there to ruffle.

"Sir!" she echoed ironically.

A shadow darkened the open doorway behind the three of them and the coachman had appeared in it. "Excuse me, sir, but the lady says she can't wait any longer--"

"Here," said Dollard bitterly, grubbing money from his billfold, "Fifty dollars. Let me get out of here before you demand payment for having lived in the house at all!"

"Sign the paper, dearest," she said sweetly. "And give Mr. Dollard his keys. We must not detain him any longer."

Durand got the door closed behind the fuming figure. Then he all but collapsed against it on the inside. "How could you do it, knowing all the time what's lying under the very floor we-?" he gagged, tearing at his collar. "What have you for nerves, what have you for heart?"

She was standing on the stairs, triumphantly counting over the cabbagehead of money she held bunched in her hand.

"Ah, but he didn't know; and that's where the difference lay. You never played poker, did you, Lou?"

49

She led the way down the railroad car aisle, he following, the railroad porter struggling along in the rear with their hand baggage, three or four pieces on each arm. She had the jaunty little stride of one who has been on trains a great deal, enjoys traveling, and knows just how to go about getting the most out of it.

"No, not there," she called back, when Durand had stopped tentatively beside one of the padded green-plush double seats. "Down here, on this side. You'll get the sun on you, on that side."

They moved on obediently to her bidding.

She stood by, supervising with attentive look, piece by piece, the disposing of their luggage to the rack overhead. Intervening once to counsel: "Put that lighter one on top of the other; the other one will crush it if you don't."

Then when he had finished: "Draw up the shade a little higher."

Durand gave her a quickly cautioning glance over the porter's bent back, implying they should not make themselves too conspicuous.

"Nonsense," she answered it aloud. "Draw it up a little more, porter. There, that will do." Then gestured benevolently toward Durand, to have him tip the man for his trouble.

She sidled into the seat, when it had been sufficiently readied, drawing out her skirts sideward and settling them about her comfortably. Durand inserted himself beside her, his face pale and strained, as though he were sitting on spikes.

She turned her head and began to survey the scene outside the window with enjoyable interest, bending the back of her hand to support her chin.

"How soon do they start?" she asked presently.

He didn't answer.

She must have been able to view his reflection on the pane of glass. Without turning her head, she said slurringly out of the corner of her mouth: "Don't take on so. People will think you are ill."

"I am," he shuddered, blowing into his hands as if to warm them. "I am."

Her little lace-mittened hand suddenly reached across his body, below cover of the seat top before them. "Take my hand, hold it for a moment. We'll be out of here before you know."

"Merciful God," he whispered, with furtively downcast eyes, "why don't they start, what are they waiting for ?"

"Read something," she suggested in a low voice, "take your mind off it."

Read something, he thought despairingly, read something! He could not have joined the letters of a single word together to make sense.

A locomotive bell began to peal, somewhere up front, and then a steam whistle blew in shrill warning.

"There," she said reassuringly. "Now!"

There was a sudden preliminary jar, that set aquiver the row of oil lamps dangling from the deep-set trough bisecting the car ceiling, then a secondary, lesser one; then the train stuttered into creaking motion. The fixed scene outside became fluid, began to slip slowly onward past the limits of their window pane, while a new one continually flowed into it, without a break, at the opposite side. She released his hand, turned her full attention to it, as enthralled as a child.

"I love to be on the go," she remarked. "Anywhere, I don't care where it is."

A butcher made his way slowly down the aisle, basket over arm, crying his wares to add to the noisy confusion of grinding wheels, creaking woodwork, and hum of blended voices that filled the car.

"Here you are, ladies and gentlemen. Mineral water, fresh fruit, all kinds of delicious sweets for yourselves or your children. Caramellos, gumdrops, licorice lozenges. It'll be a long, dusty ride. Here you are. Here you are."

She suddenly whisked her head around from the window that had absorbed her until now. "Lou," she said vivaciously, "buy me an orange, I'm thirsty. I love to suck an orange whenever I'm riding on a train."

The vendor stopped at his reluctant signal.

She leaned across him, pawing, rummaging, in the basket. "No, that one over there. It's plumper."

Durand hoisted himself sideward on the seat, to be able to reach into his pocket and draw up some coins.

The butcher took one and moved on.

Suddenly he stared, stricken, at the residue he had been left holding. Downs's collar button lay within the palm of his hand.

"Oh, God!" he moaned, and cast it furtively under the seat they were on.

50

Another hotel room, in another place. And yet the same. The hotel had a different name, that was all. The scene its windows looked out upon had a different name, that was all.

But they were the same two, in the same hotel room. The same two people, the same two runaways.

This, he realized, watching her broodingly, was what their life was going to be like from now on. Another hotel room, and then another, and still another. But always the same. Another town, and then another, and still another. Onward, and onward, and onward-- to nowhere. Until some day they would come to their last hotel room, in their last town. And then--

A short life and an exciting one, she had toasted that night back in Mobile. She had it wrong. A short life and a dull one, she should have said. No pattern of security can ever be so wearyingly repetitious as the pattern of the refugee without a refuge. No monotony of law-abidance can ever compare to the monotony of crime. He had found that out by now.

She was sitting there in a square of orange-gold sunlight by the window, one leg crossed atop the other, head bent intently to her task. Which was that of tapering her nails with an emery board. Her arms were bare to the shoulders, and the numerous all-white garments she wore were not meant to be seen by other eyes than his. The moulded cuirass of the corset was visible in its entirety, from underarms to well below the hips. And over this only the thinnest film of cambric, an in-between garment, neither under- nor over-, known as the "corset-cover" (he had learned), fell short at the unwonted height of her lower calf.

Her hair was unbound and fell loose, clothing her back in rippling finespun tawny-gold, but at the same time giving the top of her head an oddly flat aspect, ordinarily seen only on young schoolgirls. The bangs alone remained in evidence, of the customary coiffure.

One of the spikelike cigars was burning untouched on the dresser edge near her.

She felt his long-maintained, speculative look, and raised her eyes, and gave him that compressed, heart-shaped smile that was the only design her lips could fall into when expressing a smile.

"Cheer up, Lou," she said. "Cheer up, lovey."

She hitched her head pertly to indicate the scene beyond the sunflooded window. "I like it here. It's pretty here. And they dress up to kill. I'm glad we came."

"Don't sit so close to the window. You can be seen."

She gave him an incredulous look. "Why, no one knows us here."

"I don't mean that. You're in your underthings."

"Oh," she said. Then, as if still not wholly able to comprehend his punctiliousness on this point, "But they can only see my back. Not one can see my face, tell whose back it is." She moved her chair a trifle, condescendingly, with a smile as if she were doing it simply to please him.

She went back to her nails for a complacent stroke or two.

"Don't you--think of it sometimes?" he couldn't resist blurting out. "Doesn't it weigh upon you ?"

"What?" she said blankly, again looking up. "Oh--that, back there."

"That's what I mean," he said. "If I could only forget it, as you do."

"I don't forget it. It's just that I don't brood about it."

"But the very act of remembering at all, isn't that the same as brooding?"

"No," she said, flipping her hands outward in surprise. "Let me show you." She tapped the rim of her teeth, as if in search of an illustration. "Say I buy a new hat. Well, once it's bought, it's bought, and there's no more to it. I remember I bought the hat; it's not that I forget I've bought it. But I don't necessarily brood about it, dwell on it, every minute of the live-long day." She pounded one clenched hand into the hollow of the other. "I don't keep saying over and over: 'I've bought a hat,' 'I've bought a hat,' 'I've bought a hat.' Do you see?"

He was looking at her with a stunned expression. "You--you compare what happened that day at Mobile with buying a new hat?" he stammered.

She laughed. "No. Now you're twisting it around; making me out worse than I am. I know it's not punishable to buy a new hat, and the other thing is. I know you don't have to be afraid of anyone finding out you've bought a new hat, and you do of anyone finding out you've done the other thing. But that was just given for an example. You can remember a thing perfectly well, but you don't have to worry about it all the time, let it darken your life. That's all I mean."

But he was speechless; he still couldn't get past that horrendous illustration of hers.

She rose and moved over toward him slowly; stood at last, and looked down, and let her hand come to rest on his shoulder, with almost a patronizing air. Certainly not one of overweening admiration.

"Do you want to know what the trouble is, Lou? I'll tell you. The difference between you and me is not that I'm any less afraid than you of its being found out; I'm just as afraid. It's that you let your conscience bully you about it, and I don't. You make it a matter of good or bad, wrong or right; you know, like children's Sunday school lessons: going to heaven or going to hell. With me it's just something that happened, and there's no more to be said. You keep wishing you could go back and have it over again, so that you wouldn't have done it. That's where the trouble comes in. It's that your own conscience is nagging you. That's what's ailing you."

She saw that she'd shocked him. She shrugged a little, and turned away. She took up a muslin petticoat that lay in wait folded over the side of the bed, flung it out so that its folds opened circularly, stepped into it, and fastened it about her waist. The grotesque shortness of her attire disappeared, and her extremities were once more normally covered to the floor.

"Take my advice, and learn to look at it my way, Lou," she went on. "You'll find it a lot simpler. It's not something good, and it's not something bad; it's--" here she made him the concession of dropping her voice a trifle, "--just something you have to be careful about, that's all."

She took up a second petticoat, this one of taffeta bordered with lace, and donned that over the first.

He was appalled at the slow, frightening discovery he was in the process of making: which was that she had no moral sense at all.s She was, in a very actual meaning of the word, a complete savage.

"Shall we go for a little stroll ?" she suggested. "It's an ideal day for it."

He nodded, lips parted, unable to articulate.

She was now turning this way and that before the glass, holding up a succession of outer costumes at shoulder level to judge of their desirability. "Which shall I wear? The blue? The fawn? Or this plaid?" She made a little pouting grimace. "I've worn them all two or three times now apiece. People will begin to know them. Lou, fetch out that money box of yours before we go, that's a good boy. I really think it's time you were buying me a new dress."

No moral sense at all.

51

The discovery was catastrophically sudden, though it shouldn't have been. One moment, they were affluent, he could afford to give her anything she wanted. The next, they were destitute, they could scarcely meet the cost of the immediate evening's pleasure they had contemplated.

It shouldn't have been as unforeseen as all that, he had to admit to himself; shouldn't have taken them unaware like that. There had been no theft, save at his own hands; nothing like that. But there had been no replenishment either. A vanishing point was bound to be reached eventually. It had been imminent for some time, if he'd only taken the trouble to make inventory. But he hadn't; perhaps he'd been afraid to, afraid in his own mind of the too-exact knowledge that he would have derived from such a summing up: the certainty of termination. Afraid of the chill that would have been cast upon their feasting, the shadow that would have dimmed their wine. There was always tomorrow, tomorrow, to make reckoning. And tomorrow, there was always tomorrow still. And meanwhile the music swelled, and the waltz whirled ever faster, giving no pause for breath.

He'd delved in each time, in haste, in negligence, without counting what was over. So long as there was something left, that was all that mattered. Something that would take care of the next time. And now that next time was the last time, and there was no next time beyond.

They'd been about to go out for the evening, swirls of sachet fanning out behind her like an invisible white peacock's tail spread in flaunting gorgeousness, an electric tide of departure crackling about them, she stuffing frothy laced handkerchief within the collar of her gloves, he lingering behind a moment to pluck out gas jet after gas jet. She was sibilant in tangerine taffeta, flounced with bands of brown sealskin, orange willow plumes snaking like live tentacles upon her hat. She was already in the open doorway, thirsting to be gone, waiting a moment to allow him to overtake her and close the door after them, and grudging that moment's wait.

"Have you enough money with you, lovey ?" she asked companionably. And somehow made it sound entrancingly domestic; a wife being solicitous of her husband's welfare, much as if she'd said "Are you warmly enough dressed ?" or "Have you brought the latch key with you?"; though its ends were not domestic at all, but quite the reverse.

He consulted his money-fold.

"No, glad you reminded me," he said. "I'll have to get some more. I'll only be a moment, I won't keep you."

"I don't mind," she assented graciously. "When you enter late, everyone has a better chance to take in what you're wearing."

She was still there by the door, idly tapping the furled sticks of her small dress-fan, secured by silken loop about her wrist, upon the opposite recipient palm, when he returned from the bedroom where he had gone.

When she saw him coming, she dipped her knees a graceful trifle, caught higher the spreading bottom of her dress, and reached behind her to grasp the doorknob, prepared to go, this time offering to close the door for him instead of him for her.

Then she saw his gait had changed, was hesitant, expiring, not as it had been when he went briskly in.

"What is it? Something wrong?"

He was holding two single bank notes in his hand, half extending them before him, as though not knowing what to do with them.

"This is all that's left. This is all there is," he said stupidly.

"You mean it's missing, been taken ?"

"No, we've used it all. We must have, but I didn't know it. I could see it growing slimmer, but--I should have looked more closely. Each time I'd just reach in and-- There always seemed to be some over. I didn't know until this moment that--this was all it was--" He raised it helplessly, lowered it again.

He stood there without moving, looking at her now, not it, as if she could give him the answer he could not find for himself. She returned his look, but she said nothing. There was silence between them.

Her lips had parted, but in some sort of inward appraisal; they said no word. A little breath came through, in a soft, wordless "Oh" of understanding.

Her hand left the doorknob at last, and dropped down to its own level, against her side, with a little inert slap of frustration.

"What shall we do?" she said.

He didn't answer.

"Does that mean we--can't go now ?"

He looked at her, still without answering. Surveyed her entire person, from head to toe. Saw how beautifully she'd arrayed herself, how perfect in every detail the finished artistic picture she was offering for presentation. Or rather, had intended to offer, if given opportunity.

Suddenly he swerved, reached purposefully--and defiantly--for his hat.

"I'll ask for credit. We've spent enough by now, wherever it is we've gone; they should give us that."

It was now she who didn't move, remained poised there by the door. She looked thoughtfully downward at nothing there was to be seen. At last she shook her head slightly, a smile without mirth influencing her lips. "No," she said. "It's not the same. It would cast a pall, now, just knowing. And then they treat you with less respect, when you ask them. Or they commence to hound you within a few days, and you're twice as badly off as before."

She came away from the door. She closed it at last, but now before, and not behind, her. And she gave it a sort of fling away from her, in doing so; let it carry itself to its proper junction. He tried to make out if there was ill temper lurking in the gesture, and couldn't tell for sure. It might have been nothing more than jaunty disregard, an attempt to show him she didn't care whether she stayed or went. But even if there was no ill temper in it, the thought of ill temper was in his mind. So it had already appeared on the scene, in a way.

He watched her return, with indolent gait, to the seat before the mirror that she had occupied for the better part of an hour only just now. But now she gave her back to the glass, not her face. Now the former process was reversed. Now she rid herself, one by one, with limp gesture, of the accessories she had so zestfully attached to herself only a brief while ago. Her gloves fell, stringy, over her shoulder on the dressing table. Her untried fan atop them a moment later, its stylized, beguiling usage never given a chance to go into effect. Off came the tiny hat with orange willow feathers, she pitched it from her broadside (but not with violence, with philosophic riddance), and it fell upon the seat of a nearby chair. The plume tendrils fluctuated above it for a moment, like ocean-bottom vegetation stirring in deep water, then settled down over it.

"You may as well turn up the gas jets again," she said dully, "as long as we're staying in."

She raised her feet, heels upward, one by one, and taking them from behind, plucked off the bronze satin slippers with their spoolshaped Louis XV heels, full three inches in length, a daring height but pardonable because of her own stature. And let them fall as they would, and set her stockinged soles back on the floor as they were.

And last of all, undoing some certain something behind her, she allowed her dress to widen and fall of its own looseness, but only down to her seated waist, and sat that way, half-in and half-out of it, in perfect disarray. Almost as if to make a point of it.

It did something to him, to watch her undo that completed work of art she had so deftly and so painstakingly achieved. More than any spoken reproaches could have, it implicitly rebuked him.

Hands grounded in pockets, he looked down at the floor and felt small and humbled.

She took off the string of pearls that had clasped her throat and, allowing them to drizzle together, tossed them in air as if weighing them and finding them wanting, caught them in her palm.

"Will these help? You can have them if they will."

His face whitened, as if with some deep inward incision. "Bonny!" he commanded her tautly. "Don't ever say anything like that to me again."

"I meant nothing by it," she said placatingly. "You paid better than a hundred for them, didn't you? I only thought--"

"When I buy you a thing, it's yours."

They were silent for a while, their lines of gaze in opposite directions. He looking toward the window, and the impersonal, aloof evening outside. She toward the door, and (perhaps) the beckoning evening outside that.

She lit a cigar after a while. Then said in immediate compunction, "Oh, I forgot. You don't like me to do that." And turned to discard it.

"Don't put it out," he said absently. "Finish it if you like."

She extinguished it nevertheless.

Turning back, she reared one knee high before her, clasped her hands about it, settled comfortably backward. Then instantly, and again with contrition, she dissolved the pose once more. "Oh, I forgot. You don't like me to do that either."

"That was before, when you were supposed to be Julia," he said. "It's different now."

Suddenly he looked at her with redoubled closeness, as if wondering belatedly if this was some new indirect way of chiding him: reminding him of his past criticism of her faults. Her face seemed plotless enough, however. She didn't even seem to see him looking at her. The edges of her trivial mouth were curved upward in placid contentment.

"I'm sorry, Bonny," he said at last.

She returned her attention to him, from wherever it had strayed. "I don't mind," she said evenly. "I've had this happen to me before. For you, it's your first time; that makes it hard."

"You haven't had any supper," he said presently. "And it's nearing eight."

"That's right," she agreed cheerfully. "We can still eat. Can't we?"

Again he wondered if that was an indirect jibe; again it seemed to be only in his mind. But at least it was there in his mind; it must have come from somewhere.

She got up and went over to the wall and took down the pneumatic speaking-tube. She blew through the orifice and a whistling sound went traveling far downward, to its destination below.

"Will you send up a waiter," she said. "We're in Suite 12." When the man had arrived, she ordered, taking precedence over Durand.

"Bring us something small," she said. "We're not very hungry. A mutton chop apiece would do very nicely. No soup, no sweet--"

Again Durand's eyes sought out her face to see if that was meant for him, that ironic emphasis. But hers were not to be met.

"Will that be all, madam?"

"And, oh yes, one thing more. Bring us up a deck of cards, along with the tray. We're staying in this evening."

"What'd you want those for?" Durand asked, as soon as the door had closed.

She turned to him and smiled quite sweetly. "To play double solitaire," she said. "I'll teach you the game. There's nothing like it for passing the time."

His reaction didn't come at once. It was slow, it didn't materialize for some four or five minutes.

Then suddenly he picked up a bisque ornament from the center table and heaved it with all his strength, mouth knotted, and shattered it against the wall opposite him.

She must have been used to violence. She scarcely turned a hair, her eyelids barely rose enough to let her see what it had been.

"They'll charge us for that, Lou. We can't afford it now."

"I'm going to New Orleans tomorrow," he said, thick-voiced with truculence. "I'm taking the first train out. You wait for me here. I'll have money for you again, you'll see. I'll raise it from Jardine."

Her eyes were wider open now, but whether any deeper with concern, could not have been told. "No!" she said aghast. "You can't go near there. You mustn't. We're wanted. They'll catch you."

"Rather that than go on here this way, living like a dog."

Now she smiled a real smile, beaming-bright; no sweet pale copy like a stencil on her lips. "That's my Lou," she purred, velvet smooth, her voice velvet warm. "That was the right answer. I love a man that takes chances."

52

Jardine lived on Esplanade Avenue. Durand remembered the house well. He'd had dinner with them there on many a Sunday night during his bachelor days, and been honorary "uncle" to 'Jardine's little girl Marie.

The house had not changed. It was not houses that changed, he reflected ruefully, it was men. It was still honest, amiable, open of countenance. He might have been standing before it again back two or three years ago, with a little bag of bonbons in his hand for Marie. But he wasn't.

He stood there after he'd knocked, and kept holding his handkerchief to his nose, as if he were suffering from a bad head cold. It was to hide as much of his features as possible, however. And even while doing so, it occurred to him how futile such precautions were. Anyone who knew him by sight at all, would know him as well from the back, without seeing his face.

Before the door had opened he had already given up the attempt, lowered and pocketed the handkerchief.

They still had the same colored woman he remembered, Nelly, to open their door.

At sight of him her face lit up and her palms backed to shoulders. "Well, lookit who's here! Well, I declare! Why, Mr. Lou! You sure a stranger!"

He smiled sheepishly, glanced uneasily down the street.

"Is Mr. Allan back from his office yet?"

"Why, no sir. But come in anyway. He'll be along right smart. Miss Gusta, she's home. And young Miss Marie. They'll both be mighty pleased to see you, I know."

He went in past the threshold, then faltered there. "Nelly, don't--don't tell them I'm calling--just yet; I have to see Mr. Allan on business first. Just let me wait down here somewhere until he comes home, without saying anything--" He caught himself winding the brim of his hat around in his hands, like a suppliant, and quickly stopped it.

Nelly's face dropped reproachfully.

"You don't want me to tell Miss Gusta you drap in?"

"Not just yet. I have to see Mr. Allan alone first."

"Well, come in the parlor, sir, and make yourself comf'table. I light the lamp." Her effusiveness was gone. She was a little cooler now. "Take your hat ?"

"No, thanks; I'll keep it."

"You wants anything while you waiting, you just ring for me, Mr. Lou."

"I'll be all right."

She gave him a backward glance from the doorway, then she went out.

He was on thin ice, he realized. Any one of them, even Jardine himself, might have heard about it, could denounce his presence here, effect his immediate arrest. He was at their mercy; he was putting his trust where he had no certainty it could be put. Friendship? Yes, for an ordinary man, of their own kind. But friendship for a man branded a murderer? Those were two different matters, not the same thing at all.

He could hear a well-remembered woman's voice call down ringingly from somewhere above-stairs: "Who was that, Nelly?"

And at the momentary hesitation on Nelly's part, he involuntarily tightened his grip on his still nervously circling hat brim, held it arrested a moment.

"Gentleman to see Mr. Jardine on business."

"Did he wait?"

Nelly adroitly got around the problem of telling an outright lie. "I told him he not in yet."

The upstairs voice, still audible but no longer in as high a key, as if now pitched to someone else on the same floor with her, was heard to remark: "How strange to come here instead of to your papa's office." After which it withdrew, and there was no further colloquy.

Durand sat there in the glowing effulgence of the parlor, staring as if spellbound at a small handpainted periwinkle on the surface of the lamp globe, which seemed to hang suspended between himself and the white sheen that came translucently through all around it.

This is home, he thought. Nothing ever happens here, nothing bad. You come home to it with impunity, you go out again with immunity, you turn your face openly toward the world. And murder--human death brought about by the act of human hands--that is something in the Bible, in the history books, something done by the captains and the kings of old. In the passages that you perhaps skip over, when you are reading aloud to your children. Cortez and the Borgias and the Medici; poinards and poisons, long ago and faraway. But not in the full light of nineteenth-century day, in your own personal life.

This should be my home, he thought. I mean, my home should be like this man's. Why was I robbed of this? What did I do that was wrong?

Again the woman's voice came, upstairs, calling with pleasant firmness from one room to the next: "Marie. Your hair, dear, and your hands. It's getting near the time for Papa to come home."

And a younger, higher voice in answer: "Yes, Mamma. Shall I wear a ribbon in my hair tonight? Papa likes me to."

And below, sensuously drifting from the back somewhere, intermittent whiffs of rice and greens and savory frying fat.

This was all I wanted, he thought. Why have I lost it? Why was it taken from me? All other men have it. How did I offend? Who did I offend?

Jardine's key clicked in the door, and he swung around alertly in his chair, to face the open doorway, to be ready when he should appear beyond it, on his way through.

There was the tap of his stick going down to rest, and a little drumlike thump as his hat found a prong on the rack.

Then he appeared, facing stairward toward his family, unbuttoning the thigh-length mustard-colored coat he wore.

"Allan," Durand said in a circumspect voice, "I have to talk to you. Can you give me a few minutes? I mean before--before the family?"

Jardine turned abruptly, and saw him there for the first time. He came striding in, outstretched arm first, to shake his hand, but his face had already been sobered, made anxious, by Durand's opening remark.

"What are you doing here like this? When did you come back? Does Auguste know you're here? Why do they leave you sitting alone like this ?"

"I asked Nelly not to say anything. I must talk to you alone first."

Jardine pulled a velour tape ending in a thin brass ring. Then went back to the open doorway, looked out, and when she had come in answer to the summons, said with a brufiness that betokened his uneasiness: "Hold supper a few minutes, Nelly."

"Yes sir. Only I hope you two gentlemen'll bear in mind it don't git no tastier with holding."

Jardine spread out his arms and drew together the two sliding doors that sealed off the parlor. Then he came back and stood looking at Durand questioningly.

"Look, Allan, I don't know how to begin--"

Jardine shook his head, as if in dissatisfaction at the condition he found him in. "Would a drink help, Lou?"

"Yes, I think it would."

Jardine poured them, and they each drank.

Again he stood there, looking down at him in the chair.

"There's something wrong, Lou."

"Very much so."

"Where did you go? Where've you been all this time? Not a word to me. I haven't known whether you're dead or alive-"

Durand stemmed the flow of questions with a half-hearted lift of his hand.

"I'm with her again," he said after a moment. "I can't come back to New Orleans. Don't ask me why. That isn't what I came here about." Then he added, "Haven't you seen anything in the papers, that would explain it to you?"

"No," Jardine said, mystified. "I don't know what you mean."

Hasn't he, Durand wondered. Doesn't he really know? Is he telling the truth? Or is he too delicate, too considerate, to tell me--

Jardine consulted his glass, drained the last drop, said: "I don't want to know anything you don't want to tell me, Lou. Each man's life is his own."

Downs's was his own too, passed through Durand's mind; until I--

"Well, then we'll come to the point that brings me here," he said, with a briskness he was far from feeling. He turned around in the chair to face him once more. "Allan, how much would the business bring as it stands today? I mean, what would be a fair price for it, if someone were to come along and--"

Jardine's face paled. "You're thinking of selling, Lou?"

"I'm thinking of selling, Allan, yes. To you, if you'll buy out my share from me. Will you? Can you ?"

Jardine seemed incapable of answering immediately. He started walking slowly back and forth, on a short straight course beside the chair Durand sat in. He clasped his arms. Then presently he locked hands over his two rear pockets, and let the skirt of his coat flounce down over them.

"You may as well know this now, before we go any further," Durand added. "I can't sell to anyone else but you. I can't put in an appearance to do so. I can't approach anyone else. The lawyer will have to come here to your house. The whole thing will have to be done quietly."

"At least wait a day or two," Jardine urged. "Think it over--"

"I haven't a day or two in which to wait!" Durand slowly wagged his head from side to side in exasperated impatience. "Can't you understand ?Must I tell you openly?"

In a moment more, he cautioned himself, it will be too late; once I have told him, I will be completely at his mercy. What I am asking him to buy from me, would go to him by default anyway; all he would have to do is step over to that bellpull over there--

But he went ahead and told him anyway, with scarcely the pause required by the warning thought to deliver its admonition.

"I'm a fugitive, Allan. I'm outside the law. I've lost all my rights of citizenship."

Jardine stopped his pacing, stunned. "Great God!" he breathed slowly.

Durand slapped at his own thigh, with a sort of angry despair. "It's got to be right tonight. Right now. It can't wait. I can't. I'm taking a risk even staying in the town that long--"

Jardine bent toward him, took him by the shoulders, gripped hard. "You're throwing away your whole future, your whole life's work--I can't let you--"

"I have no future, Allan. Not a very long one. And my life's work, I'm afraid, is behind me, anyway, whether I sell or not."

He let his wrists dangle limp, down between his legs, in a cowed attitude. "What are we going to do, Allan ?" he murmured abjectly. "Are you going to help me?"

There was a tapping at the door. Then a childish voice: "Papa. Mamma wants to know if you're going to be much longer. The duck's getting awfully dry. Nelly can't do a thing with it."

"Soon, dear, soon," Jardine called over his shoulder.

"Go in to your family," Durand urged. "I'm spoiling your supper. I'll sit in here and wait."

"I couldn't eat with this on my mind," Jardine said. He bent to him once more, as if in renewed effort to extract the confidence from him that he sought. "Look, Lou. We've known each other since you were twenty-three and I was twenty-eight. Since we were clerks together in the shipping department of old man Morel, perched on adjoining stools, slaving away. We got our promotions together. When he wanted to promote you, you spoke for me. When he wanted to promote me, I spoke for you. Finally, when we were ready, we pooled our resources and entered into business together. Our own import house. On a shoestring at first, even with the help of the money Auguste had brought to me in marriage. And you remember those early days."

"I remember, Allan."

"But we didn't care. We said we'd rather work for ourselves, and fail, than work for another man, and prosper. And we worked for ourselves--and prospered. But there are things in this business of ours, today, that cannot be taken out again. There is sweat, and worry, and the high hopes of two young fellows, and the prime years of their lives. Now you come to me and want to buy these things from me, want me to sell them to you, as if they were sackfuls of our green beans from Colombia-- How can I, even if I wanted to? How can I set a price ?"

"You can tell what the business is worth, in cold cash, that is on our books. And give me half, in exchange for a quit-claim, a deed of sale, whatever the necessary paper is. Forget I am Durand. I am just anybody, I am a stranger who happens to have a fifty per cent interest. Give its approximate value back to me in money, that is all I ask you." He gestured violently. "Don't you see, Allan? I can no longer participate in the business, I can no longer play any part in it. I can't be here to do so, I can't stay here."

"But why? There isn't anything you can have done--"

"There is. There's one thing."

Jardine was waiting, looking at him fixedly.

"Once I tell you, Allan, I'm at your mercy. You needn't give me a cent, and my half of the business goes to you, eventually, anyway-- by default."

But he was at his mercy anyway, he realized ruefully, whether he told him or not.

Jardine bridled a little, straightened up. "Lou, I don't take that kindly. We're friends--"

"Friendship stops short at what I'm about to tell you. There are no friends beyond a certain point. The law even forbids it, punishes it."

The tapping came again. "Mamma's getting put out. She says she's going to sit down without you, Papa. It was a special duck--"

And on that homespun domestic note, Durand blurted out, as if already past the point at which he could any longer stop himself:

"Allan, I've done murder. I can't stay here past tonight. I have to have money."

And dropped his head into his upturned, sheltering hands, as though the hangman's noose had already snapped his neck.

"Papa ?" came questioningly through the door.

"Wait, child, wait," Jardine said sickly, his face white as a sheet.

There was a ghastly silence.

"I knew it would come to this," Jardine said at last, dropping his voice. "She was bad for you from the first. Auguste sensed it on the very day of your marriage, she told me so herself; women are quicker that way--"

He was pouring himself a drink, as though it were his crime. "You met her-- You found her-- You lost your head--" He brought one to Durand. "But you're not to be blamed. Any man-- Let me find you a good lawyer, Lou. There isn't a court in the state--"

Durand looked up at him and gave a pathetic smile.

"You don't understand, Allan. It isn't--she. It's the very man I engaged to find her and arrest her. He did find her, and to save her I--"

Jardine, doubly horrified now, for at least in his earlier concern there had been, noticeably, a glint of vengeful satisfaction, recoiled a step.

"I'm with her again," Durand admitted. And in an almost inaudible whisper, as if he were telling it to his conscience and not to the other man in the room with him, "I love her more than my life itself."

"Papa," accosted them with frightening proximity, in a piping treble, "Mamma said I shouldn't leave this door until you come out of there!" The doorknob twisted, then unwound.

Jardine stood for a long moment, looking not so much at his friend as at some scene he alone could see.

His arm reached out slowly at last and fell heavily, dejectedly, but with unspoken loyalty, upon Durand's shoulder.

"I'll see that you get your half of the business' assets, Lou," he said. "And now--we mustn't keep Auguste waiting any longer. Keep a stiff upper lip. Come in and have supper with us."

Durand rose and crushed Jardine's hand almost shatteringly for a moment, between both of his. Then, as if ashamed of this involuntary display of emotion, hastily released it again.

Jardine opened the door, bent down to kiss someone who remained unseen, through the guarded opening. "Run in, dear. We're coming."

Durand braced himself for the ordeal to come, straightened his shoulders, jerked at the wings of his coat, adjusted his collar. Then he moved after his host.

"You won't tell them, Allan ?"

Jardine drew the door back and stood aside to let him go through first. "There are certain things a man doesn't take in to his suppertable with him, Lou." And he slung his arm about his friend's shoulder and walked beside him, loyally beside him, in to where his family waited.

53

At dawn he was already up, from a sleepless, worried bed, and dressed and pacing the floor of his shabby, hidden-away hotel room. Waiting for Jardine to come with the money--

("I can't get you the money before morning, Lou. I haven't it here in the house; I'll have to draw it from the bank. Can you wait ?"

"I'll have to. I'm at the Palmetto Hotel. Under the name of Castle. Room Sixty. Bring it to me there. Or as much of it as you can, I cannot wait for a complete inventory.")

--fearing more and more with the passing of each wracking hour that he wouldn't. Until, as the hour for the banks to open came and went, and the morning drew on, fear had become certainty and certainty had become conviction. And he knew that to wait on was only to invite the inevitable betrayal to overtake him, trap him where he was.

A hundred times he unlocked the door and listened in the dingy corridor outside, then went back and locked himself in again. Nothing, no one. He wasn't coming. Only a quixotic fool would have expected him to.

Again it occurred to him how completely at the mercy of his former partner he had put himself. All he had to do was bring the police with him instead of the money, and there was an end to it. Why should he give up thousands of hard-earned dollars? And money, Durand reminded himself, did strange things to people. Turned them even against their own flesh and blood, why not an outsider?

Bonny's remark came back to him. "And we're none of us very much good, the best of us, men or women alike." She knew. She was wise in the ways of the world, wiser by far than he. She would never have put herself in such a false position.

No friend should be put to such a test. A man without the law no longer had a claim, no longer had a right to expect--

There was a subdued knock, and he shrank back against the wall. "Here they come now to arrest me," flashed through his mind. "He's put them onto me-"

He didn't move. The knock came again.

Then Jardine's whispered voice. "Lou. Are you in there? It's all right. It's me."

He'd brought them with him; he'd led them here in person.

With a sort of bitter defiance, because he could no longer escape, because he'd waited too long, he went to the door and unlocked it. Then took his hands from it and let it be.

There was a moment's wait, then it opened of itself, and Jardine came in, alone. He closed and relocked it behind him. He was holding a small satchel.

He carried it to the table, set it down.

All he said, matter of factly and with utter simplicity, was: "Here is the money, Lou. I'm sorry I'm so late."

Durand couldn't answer for a moment, turned away, overcome.

"What's the matter, Lou? Why, your eyes--!" Jardine looked at him as though he couldn't understand what was amiss with him.

Durand knuckled at them sheepishly. "Nothing. Only, you came as you said you would--You brought it as you said you would--" Something choked in his throat and he couldn't go ahead.

Jardine looked at him compassionately. "Once you would have taken such a thing for granted, you would have expected it of me. What has changed you, Lou? Who has changed you?" And softly, fiercely, through his clenched teeth, as his knotted hand came down implacably upon the table top, he exhaled: "And may God damn them for it! I hate to see a decent man dragged down into the gutter."

Durand stood there without answering.

"You know it's true, or else you wouldn't stand there and take it from me," Jardine growled. "But I'll say no more; each man's hell is his own."

(I know it's true, Durand thought wistfully; but I must follow my heart, how can I help where it leads me?) "No, don't say any more," he agreed tersely.

Jardine unstrapped and stripped open the bag. "The full amount is in here," he told him, brisk and businesslike now. "And that squares all accounts between us."

Durand nodded stonily.

"I cannot have you at my house again," Jardine told him. "For your own sake."

Durand gave a short, and somewhat ungracious, syllable of laughter. "I understand."

"No, you don't. I am trying to protect you. Auguste already suspects something, and I cannot vouch for her discretion if you return."

"Auguste hates me, doesn't she?" Durand said with detached curiosity, as though unable to account for it.

Jardine didn't answer, and by that confirmed the statement.

He gestured toward the contents of the satchel, still withholding it. "I turn this over to you under one condition, Lou. I ask it of you for your own good."

"What is it?"

"Don't turn this money over to anyone else, no matter how close they are to you. Keep it safe. Keep it by you. Don't let it out of your possession."

Durand laughed humorlessly. "Who am I likely to entrust it to? The very position I'm in ensures my not--"

Jardine repeated his emphasis, so that there could be no mistaking it. "I said, no matter how close they are to you."

Durand looked at him hard for a minute. "I'm in good hands, I see," he said bitterly at last. "Auguste hates me, and you hate-- my wife."

"Your wife," Jardine said tonelessly.

Durand tightened his hands. "I said my wife."

"Don't let's quarrel, Lou. Your word."

"The word of a murderer?"

"The word of the man who was my best friend. The word of the man who was Louis Durand," Jardine said tautly. "That's good enough for me."

"Very well, I give it."

Jardine handed him the satchel. "I'll go now."

There was a constraint between them now. Jardine offered his hand in parting. Durand saw it waiting there, allowed a full moment to go by before taking it. Then when at last they shook, it was more under compulsion of past friendship than present cordiality.

"This is probably a final goodbye, Lou. I doubt we'll ever see one another again."

Durand dropped his eyes sullenly. "Let's not linger over it, then. Good luck, and thank you for having once been my friend."

"I am still your friend, Lou."

"But I am not the man whose friend you were."

Their hands uncoupled, fell away from one another.

Jardine moved toward the door.

"You know what I would do in your place, of course? I would go to the police, surrender myself, and have it over once and for all."

"And hang," Durand said sombrely.

"Yes, even to hang is better than what lies ahead of you. You could be helped, Lou. This way, no one can help you. If I were in your place-"

"You couldn't be in my place," Durand cut him short. "It wouldn't have happened to you, to start with. You are not the kind such things befall. I am. You repel them. I attract them. It happened to me. To no one but me. And so I must deal with it. I must do--as I must do."

"Yes, I guess you must," Jardine conceded sadly. "None of us can talk for the other man." He opened the door, looking up along its edge with a sort of melancholy curiosity, as if he had never seen the edge of an open door before. He even palmed it, in passing, as if to feel what it was.

The last thing he said was: "Take care of yourself, Lou."

"If I don't, who else will?" Durand answered from the depths of his aloneness. "Who is there in this whole wide world who will ?"

54

He only breathed freely again when the train had pulled out, and only looked freely from the window again when the last vestiges of the town had fallen behind and the dreary coastal sand flats had begun. The town that he had once loved most of all places in this world.

The train was a rickety, caterpillar-like creeper, that stopped at every crossroads shed and water tank along the way, or so it seemed, and didn't deposit him at his destination until well onto one in the morning. He found the station vicinity deserted, and all but unlighted; carriageless as well, and had to walk back to their hotel bag in hand, under a panel of brittle (and somehow satiric) stars.

And though the thought of surprising her in some act of treachery had not been the motive for his arriving a half night sooner than he'd said he would, the realization of how fatally enlightening this unheralded return could very well prove to be, slowly grew on him as he walked along, until it had taken hold of him altogether. By the time he had reached the hotel and climbed to their floor and stood before their door, he was almost afraid to take his key to it and open it. Afraid of what he would find. Not afraid of conventional faithlessness so much as her own characteristic kind of faithlessness. Not afraid of finding her in other arms so much as not finding her there at all. Finding her fled and gone in his absence, as he had once before.

He opened softly, and he held his breath back. The room was dark, and the fragrance of violets that greeted him meant nothing, it could have been from yesterday as well as from today. Besides, it was in his heart rather than in his nostrils, so it was no true test.

He took out a little box of wax matches, that clicked and rattled with his trepidation, felt for the sandpaper tab fastened to the wall, and kindled the lamp wick. Then turned to look, as the slow-rising golden tide washed away night.

She was sleeping like a child, as innocent as one, as beautiful as one. (And only in sleep perhaps could she ever obtain such innocence any longer). And as gracefully, as artlessly disposed, as a child. Her hair flooded the pillow, as if her head were lying in the middle of a field of slanting sun-yellowed grass. One arm was hidden, the dimpled point of an elbow protruding from under the pillow all that could be seen of it. The other lay athwart her, to hang straight down over the side of the bed. Its thumb and forefinger were still touching together, making an irregular little loop that had once held something. Under it, on the carpet, lay two cards, the queen of diamonds and the knave of hearts.

The rest of the deck lay scattered about on the counterpane, some of them even on her own recumbent form.

He got down there beside her, at the bedside, on one knee, and took up her dangling hand, and found it softly, yet in a burning gratitude, with his lips. And though he didn't know it, had fallen into it without thought, his pose was that of the immemorial lover pleading his suit. Pleading his suit to a heart he cannot soften.

He swept off the cards onto the floor, replaced them with the money he had brought from New Orleans. Even raised his arms above her, holding it massed within them, letting it snow down upon her any which way it willed, in a green and orange leafy shower.

Her eyes opened, and following the undulant surface of the counterpane they were so close to, sighted at something, taking on a covetous expression with their whites uppermost, by the fact of their lying so low; but one that was perhaps closer to the truth than not.

"A hundred-dollar bill," she murmured sleepily.

"Lou's back," he whispered. "Look what he's brought you from New Orleans." And gathering up some of the fallen certificates, let them stream down all over again. One of them caught in her hair. And she reached up and felt for it there, with an expression of simpering satisfaction. Then having felt it was there, left it there, as though that was where she most wanted it to be.

She stretched out her hands to him, and traced his brows, and the turn of his face, and the point of his ear, in expression of lazy appreciation.

"What were those cards?"

"I was trying to tell our fortunes," she said. "And I fell asleep doing it. I got the queen of diamonds. The money card. And it came true. I'll never laugh at those things again."

"And what did I get?"

"The ace of spades."

He laughed. "What one's that ?"

He felt her hand, which had been straying in his hair, stop for a moment. "I don't know."

He had an idea she did, but didn't want to tell him.

"What'd you do that for? Try reading them."

"I wanted to see if you were coming back or not."

"Didn't you know I would ?"

"I did," she hedged. "But I wasn't sure."

"And I wasn't sure I'd find you here any longer," he confessed.

Suddenly she had one of those flashes of stark sincerity she was so capable of, and so seldom exercised. She swept her arms about his neck in a convulsive, despairing, knotted hug. "Oh, God!" she mourned bitterly. "What's wrong with the two of us anyway, Lou? Isn't it hell when you can't trust one another ?"

He sighed for answer.

Presently she said, "I'm going back to sleep a little while more."

Her head came to rest against his, nestled there, in lieu of the pillow.

"Leave the money there," she purred blissfully. "It feels good lying all over me."

In a little while he could tell by her breathing she was sleeping again. Her head to his, her arms still twined collarlike about him. He could never get any closer to her than this, somehow he felt. He in her arms, she unconscious of him there.

His heart said a prayer. Not knowing to whom, but asking it of the nothingness around him, that he had plunged himself into of his own accord.

"Make her love me," he pleaded mutely, "as I love her. Open her heart to me, as mine is open to her. If she can't love me in a good way, let it be in a bad way. Only, in some way. Any way, at all. This is all I ask. For this I'll give up everything. For this I'll take whatever comes, even the ace of spades."

55

He came upon it quite by accident. The merest chance of happening to go where he did, when he did. More than that even, of happening to do as he did, when he went where he did.

She had asked him to go out and get her some of the fledgling cigars she was addicted to, "La Favorita" was their name, while he waited about for her to catch up with him in her dressing, always a process from two to three times slower than his own. She smoked quite openly now, that is in front of him, at all times when they were alone together. Nothing he could do or say would make her desist, so it was he at last who desisted in his efforts to sway her, and let her be. And it was he, too, who emptied off and caused to disappear the ashes she recklessly left about behind her, or opened the windows to carry the aroma off, and even, once or twice when they had been intruded upon unexpectedly by a chambermaid or the like, caught up the cigar and drew upon it himself, as if it were his own, though he was a nonsmoker--all for the sake of her reputation and to keep gossip from being bruited about.

"What did you do--before ?" he asked her, on the day of this present request.

He meant before she'd met him. Wondering if there'd been someone else, then, to go and fetch them for her.

"I had to go and get them for myself," she confessed.

"You?" he gasped. There seemed to be no end to the ways in which she could startle him.

"I usually told them it was for my brother, that he was ill and couldn't come for them himself, had sent me in his place. They always believed me implicitly, I could tell, but--" She shrugged with a nuance of aversion.

How could they have failed to, he reflected? How could anyone in his right senses have dreamed a woman would dare enter a tobacco shop on her own behalf?

"But I didn't like to do it much," she added. "Everyone always stared so. You'd think I were an ogre or something. If there were more than one in there, and there usually was, the most complete frozen silence would fall, as if I had cast a spell or something. And yet no matter how quickly it fell, it was never quickly enough to avoid my catching some word or other that I shouldn't, just as I first stepped in. Then they would stand there so guilty looking, wondering if I had heard, and if I had, if I understood its meaning." She laughed. "I could have told them that I did, and spared them their discomfort."

"Bonny!" he said in taut reproof.

"Well, I did," she insisted. "Why deny it?" Then she laughed once more, this time at the expression on his face, and pretended to fling something at him. "Oh, get along, old Prim and Proper!"