Waltz Into Darkness

The tobacco shop he selected for the filling of her request, and his choice was quite at random, being in a resort town, sold other things as well with which to tempt its transient clientele. Picture cards on revolving panels, writing papers, glass jars of candy, souvenirs, even a few primary children's toys. There was in addition, just within the entrance where it could most readily catch the eye, an inclined wooden rack, holding newspapers from various other cities, an innovation calculated to appeal to homesick travelers.

He stopped by this as he was leaving and idly looked it over, hoping to find one from New Orleans. He had that slightly wistful feeling that the very name of the place alone was enough to cause him. Home. Word of home, in exile. Canal Street in the sunshine; Royal Street, Rampart Street, the Cabildo-- He forgot where he was, and he felt lonely, and he ached somewhere so deep down inside that it must have been his very marrow. Love of another kind; the love every man has for the place he first came from, the place he first knew.

There were none to be found. He noticed one from Mobile, and withdrew that from the rack instead. It was not new; having remained unsold until now, he found it to be already dated two full weeks in the past.

Behind him meanwhile, disregarded, the storekeeper was urging helpfully: "Help you, sir? What town you from, mister? Got 'em all there. And if not, be glad to send for whichever one you want--"

He had opened it, meanwhile, casually. And from the inner page--it was only a single sheet, folded--this leaped up, searing him like a flash of gunpowder flame:

A HORRIFYING DISCOVERY IN THIS CITY.

The skeleton of a man has been unearthed in the cellar of a house on Decatur Street, in this city, within the last few days. At the time of the recent high water the occupants of the house quitted it, as did all their immediate neighbors. On their return the sunken outlines of a grave were revealed, its contents partly discernible. it is believed the flood washed away the loosely replaced soil, for there had been no sign until then of such an unlawful burial. Adding to the belief that foul play was committed, was the finding of a lead bullet imbedded in the remains. The present householders, who at once reported their grim find to the authorities, are absolved of all blame, since the condition of the remains prove the grave to have been in existence well before their occupancy began.

The authorities are at present engaged in compiling a record of all former occupants in order to trace them for questioning. More developments will be given later, as they are made known to us.

She turned from her mirror to stare, as he blasted the door in minutes later, breathing heavily, greenish of face. Her own cheeks were rosy as ripe peaches with the recent application of the rabbit's foot. "What is it? You're as white as though you'd seen a ghost."

I have, he thought; face to face. The ghost of the man we thought we'd buried forever.

"It's been found out," he said tersely.

She knew at once.

She read it through.

She took it with surprising matter-of-factness, he thought. No recoil, no paling; with an almost professional objectivity, as if her whole interest were in its accuracy and not in its context. She said nothing when she'd completed it. He was the one had to speak.

"Well ?"

"That was something we had to expect some day." She gestured with the paper, cast it down. "And there it is. What more is there to say ?" She shrugged philosophically. "We haven't done so badly. It could have been much quicker." She began to count on her fingers, the way gossiping housewives do over an impending childbirth. Or rather, its antecedents. "When was it? About the tenth of June, if I remember. It's a full three months now--"

"Bonny!" he retched, his eyes closing in horror.

"They won't know any more who it is. They won't be able to tell. That's one thing in our favor."

"But they know, they know," he choked, taking swift two-paced turns this way and that, like a bear seeking its way out through cage-bars.

She rose suddenly, flinging down something with a sort of angered impatience. Angered impatience with him, seeking to calm him, seeking to reason with him, for she went to him, took him by the two facings of his coat, and shook him once, quite violently, as if for his own good, to instill some sense in him.

"Will you listen to me ?" she flared. "Will you use your head? They know what, now. Very well. But they still don't know who. They don't know who caused it. And they never will." She gave a precautionary glance toward the closed door, lowered her voice. "There was no one in that room that day. No one in that house that day. No one who saw it happen. Never forget that. They can surmise, they can suspect, they can even feel sure, all they want, but they cannot prove. And the time is past, it is already too late; they will never be able to on the face of God's green earth. What was it they told you yourself when you went to them about me? You must have proof. And they have none. You threw the--you know what, away; it's lying rusted, buried in the sand, somewhere along the beach at Mobile, being eaten away by the salt water. Can they tell that a certain bullet comes from a certain one, and no other ?" She laughed derisively. "Not in any way that's ever been found yet!"

Half heeding her, he glanced around him at the walls, and even upward at the ceiling, as though he felt them closing in upon him.

"Let's get out of here," he said in a choked voice, pulling at his collar. "I can't stand it any more."

"It's not here it's been discovered. It's in Mobile. We're as safe here as we were before it was discovered. They didn't know we were here before. They still don't know we're here now."

He wanted to put an added move, an extra lap, even if a fruitless unneeded one, between themselves and Nemesis, looming dark like a massing cloudbank on the horizon.

She sighed, giving him a look as if she found him hopeless. "There goes our evening, I suppose," she murmured, more to herself than to him. "And I was counting on wearing the new wine red taffeta."

She clapped him reassuringly on the arm. "Go down and get yourself a drink; make it a good stiff one. You need that now more than anything, I can see that. There's a good boy. Then come back, and we'll see how you feel by that time, and we'll figure it out then. There's a good boy." And she added, quite inconsequentially, "I'll go ahead dressing in the meantime, anyway. I did want to show them that wine-red taffeta."

In the end they stayed for the time being. But it was not her reasoning that kept him, so much as a fascinating horror that held him in its grip now. He was waiting for the next Mobile newspaper to arrive at the tobacco shop, and knew no other way of obtaining it than by remaining close at hand, here where they were.

It took five days, though he prodded the shopkeeper almost continuously in between.

"Sometimes they send 'em, sometimes they don't," the latter told him. "I could write and hurry them up, if you'd want me to."

"No, don't do that," Durand said rather hastily. "It's just that-- I find nothing to do with myself down here. I like to get the news of the old home town."

Then when it came, he didn't have the courage to examine it there in the store, he took it back to her and they searched for it together, she holding the sheets spread, his strained face low on her shoulder.

"There it is," she said crisply, and narrowed the expanse with a sharp, crackling fold, and they read it together.

. . . Bruce Dollard, a renting agent, who has had charge of the property for the past several years, has informed the authorities of one instance in which the occupants gave abrupt notice of departure, quitting the house within the space of a single morning, with no previous indication before that day of intending to do so.

The proprietor of a tool shop has identified a shovel found in the cellar of the house as one that he sold to an unidentified woman some time ago, and it is thought the purchase of this implement may well aid in fixing the approximate time of the misdeed.

Other than that, there have been no further developments, but the authorities are confident of bringing to light new . . . .

"Now they know," he said bitterly. "Now there can be no denying it any longer. Now they know."

"No they don't," she said flatly. "Or it wouldn't be in here like this. They're guessing, as much as they ever were."

"The shovel--"

"The shovel was in the house, long after we left. Others could have used it, who came after us."

"It gets worse, all the time."

"It only seems to. They want to do the very thing to you they are doing: frighten you, cause you to blunder in some way. In actuality it's no whit worse than it was before it was found."

"How can you say that, when it stands there before you in black and white ?"

She shook her head. "The barking dog can't bite you at the same time; he has to stop when he's ready to sink his teeth in. Don't you know that when they do know, if they do, we will never know they do? You are waiting for a message that will never reach us. You are looking for news that will never come. Don't you know that we're safe so long as they keep on mentioning it? When they stop, that's the time to look out. When sudden silence falls, the danger has really begun."

He wondered where she got her wisdom. From hard-won experience of her own? Or had it been born in her blood, as cats can see in the dark and avoid pitfalls?

"Couldn't it mean that they've forgotten?"

She gave him another capsule of her bitter 'wisdom, sugared with a hard, wearied smile.

"The police? They never forget, lovey. It's we who will have to. If we want to live at all."

He brought in three papers the next time. Three successive ones, each a day apart, but that had come in all together. They divided them up, went to work separately, hastily ruffling them over page by page, in search of what they were after.

He turned his head sharply, looked at her half frightened. "It's stopped! There's not a word about it any more."

"Nor in these either." She nodded with sage foreboding. "Now the real danger is beginning. Now it's under way."

He flung the sheets explosively aside, rose in instant readiness, so much under her guidance had he fallen in these things. "Shall we go?"

She considered, made their decision. "We'll wait for one more newspaper. We can give ourselves that much leeway. They may already know who, but I doubt that they still know where."

Another wait. Three days more this time. Then the next one came. Again nothing. Dead silence. Brooding silence, it almost seemed to him, as they pored over it together.

This time they just looked at one another. It was she who rose at last, put hands to the shoulders of her cream satin dressing robe to take it off. Coolly, unhurriedly, but purposefully.

"Now's the time to go," she said quietly. "They're on to us."

He was still baffled, even this late, at the almost sixth sense she seemed to have developed. It frightened him. He knew, at least, it was something he would never attain.

"I'll begin to pack," she said. "Don't go out any more. Stay up here where you are until we're ready."

He shuddered involuntarily. He sat on there, watching her, following her movements with his eyes as she moved about. It was like--observing an animated divining rod, that walked and talked like a woman.

"You went about it wrong," she remarked presently. "It's too late to mend now, but you may have even hastened it, for all we know. Singling out just the Mobile papers each time. Word of things like that can travel more swiftly than you know."

"But how else--?" he faltered.

"Each time you bought one, you should have bought one from some other place at the same time, even if you discarded it immediately afterward. In that way you divide suspicion."

She went on into the next room.

Even that there was a wrong and a right way to go about, he reflected helplessly. Ah, the wisdom of the lawless.

She came back to the door for a moment, pausing in midpacking.

"Where shall it be now? Where shall we go from here?"

He looked at her, haunted. He couldn't answer that.

56

They came to a halt in Pensacola, at last, for a little while, to catch their breaths. They had now followed the great, slow, curve the Gulf Coast makes as far as they could go along it, heading eastward, always eastward. By fits and starts, by frightened spurts and equally frightened stops, some long, some short, they'd followed their destiny blindly. New Orleans, then Biloxi, then Mobile, then Pensacola. With many a little hidden-away place in between.

Now Pensacola. They couldn't go any farther than that, along their self-appointed trajectory, without leaving the littoral behind, and for some reason or other, probably fear of the unknown, they clung to the familiar coastline. From there the curve dropped sharply away, past the huddle of tin-roofed shacks that was Tampa, on down to the strange, other-language foreignness of Havana. And that would have meant cutting themselves off completely, exile irrevocable beyond power to return. (Returning ships were inspected, and they had no documents.) Nor did they want to cut inland and make for Atlanta, the next obvious step. She was afraid, for reasons of her own, of the North, and though that was not the North, it was a step toward it.

So, Pensacola. They took a house again in Pensacola. Not for grandeur now, not for style, not to feel "really" married, but for the sake of simple, elementary safety.

"They spot you much easier in a hotel," she whispered, in their rain-beaten, one-night hotel. "They nose into your business quicker. People come and go more, all around you, carrying tales away with them and spreading them all around."

He nodded, bending to peer from under the lowered window shade, then starting back as a flash of lightning limned it intolerably bright.

They took the most remote, hidden, inconspicuous house they could find, on a drowsing, tree-lined street well out from the center of town. Other houses not too near, neighbors not too many; they put heavy lace curtains in the windows, to be safer still from prying eyes. They engaged a woman out of sheer compulsion, but pared her presence to a minimum; only three days a week, and she must be gone by six, not sleep under their roof. They spoke guardedly in front of her, or not at all.

They were going to be very discreet, they were going to be very prudent this time.

The first week or two, every time Bonny came or went from the house in daylight, she held her parasol tipped low as she stepped to or from the carriage, so that it shielded her face. And he, without that advantage of concealment, kept his head down all he could. So that, almost, he always seemed to be looking for something along the ground each time he entered or left.

And when a neighbor came to offer a courtesy call, as the custom was, laden with homemade jellies and the like, Bonny held her fast at the door, and made voluble explanations that they were not settled yet and the house was not in order, as an excuse for not asking her in.

The woman went away, with affronted mien and taking her gifts back with her unpresented, and when next they sighted her on the walk she made no salutation and looked the other way.

"You should not have done that," he cautioned, stepping out from where he had listened, as the frustrated visitor departed. "That looks even more suspicious, to be so skittish."

"There was no other way," she said. "If I had once admitted her, then others would have come, and I would have been expected to return their calls, and there would have been no end to it."

After that once, no others came.

"They probably think we live together," she told him, once, jeeringly. "I always leave my left glove off, now, every time I go out, and hold my hand up high, to the parasol-stick, so that they cannot fail to see the wedding hand." And punctuated it: "The filthy sows!"

Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had come to Pensacola. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had taken a house in Pensacola. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers-- from nowhere. On the way to--no one knows.

57

This time he did not tell her; she guessed it by his face. She saw him standing there by the window, staring out at nothing, gnawing at his lip. And when she spoke to him, said something to him, his answer, instead of being in kind, was to turn away, thrust hands in pockets, and begin to pace the room on a long, straight course, up and down.

She understood him so well by now, she knew it could be nothing but the thing it was.

She nodded finally, after watching him closely for some moments. "Again ?" she said cryptically.

"Again," he answered, and came to a halt, and flung himself into a chair.

She flung from her irritably a stocking she had been donning upward over her arm in search of rents. "Why is it always that way with us?" she complained. "We no sooner can turn around and draw our breaths, than it's gone again, and the whole thing starts over!"

"It goes, with anyone," he said sombrely. "It's the one thing you can't hold and yet use at the same time."

"With us, it seems to dash!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I never saw the like." It was now she who had sought the window, was seeking out that distant, faltering star of their fortunes, up beyond somewhere, that he had been scanning earlier. There for only the two of them, and no one else, to see. "Does that mean New Orleans again ?"

They had grown so, they could understand one another almost without words, certainly without the fully explicit rounded phrase.

"There's no more New Orleans; that's done. There's nothing left there any longer to go back for."

They had even grown alike in mannerisms. It was now she who gnawed at her underlip. "How much have we?"

"Two hundred and some," he answered without lifting his head.

She came close to him and put her hand to the outside of his arm, as if she wished to attract his attention; although she had it in full already.

"There are two things can be done," she said. "We can either sit and do nothing with it, until it is all gone. Or we can take it and set it to work for us."

He simply looked up at her; this time there was a flaw in their mutual understanding, a blind spot.

"I have known many men with less than two hundred for a stake to run it up to two or three thousand."

She kept her hand on his arm, as if the thought were entering by there in some way, and not by word of mouth. It still failed to.

"Do you know any card games?" she persisted.

"There was one I used to play with Jardine in our younger days, of an evening. Bezique, I think.. I scarcely remem--"

"I mean real games," she interrupted impatiently.

He understood her, then.

"You mean gamble with it? Risk it?"

She shook her head, more impatient than ever. "Only fools gamble with it. Only fools risk it. I'll show you how to play so that you're sure of running up your two hundred."

He saw what she really meant, then.

"Cheat," he said tonelessly.

She flung her head away from him, then brought it back again.

"Don't be so sanctimonious about it. Cheat is just a word. Why use that particular one? There are plenty of others just as good. 'Prepare' yourself. 'Insure' against losing. Why leave everything to chance? Chance is a harlot."

She stepped away, caught at the back of a chair, began dragging it temptingly after her, at a slant.

"Come, sit down. I'll teach you the game itself first."

She was a good teacher. In an hour he knew it sufficiently well.

"You now know faro," she said. "You know it as well as I or anyone else can show it to you. Now I'll teach you the really important part. I must put on some things first."

He sat there idly fingering the cards while she was gone. She came back decked with all her jewelry, as she would have worn it of any evening. It looked grotesque, overlaying the household deshabille she wore.

She sat down before him, and something made his hand shake a little. As does a hand that is about to commit something heinous.

"There are four suits, mark them well," she said briskly. "I will not be sitting in the game with you, they do not play with women, and everything depends upon the quick coordination between us, you and me. Yet on the river boats it never failed, and so it should not fail here. It is the simplest system of all, and the most easily discovered, but we must use it, for your own fingers are not yet deft enough at rigging a deal, and so you must rely on me and not yourself to see you through the tight places. We will use it sparingly, saving it each time for the moment that counts the most. Now, mark. When my hand strays to my bosom so, that's hearts. The pendant at my throat, that's diamonds. The eardrop on the left, spades. The one on the right, clubs. Then you watch my hand as it goes down again, that gives you the count. The fingers are numbered from one to ten, starting at the outside of the left hand. The little finger of the left hand is one, the little finger of the right, ten. Whichever one I fold back, or only shorten a little, gives the count."

"How does that tell me when he's holding jacks, queens or kings?"

"They follow in regular order, eleven, twelve, thirteen. A king would be a folding-back of the little finger on the left hand and of the third finger on the left hand. An ace is simply one."

"How can you hope to see every card he holds in his hand, and signal me?"

"I can't and I don't try. One or two of the top cards are all you need, and those are all I give you."

She thrust the deck toward him over the tabletop.

"Deal me a hand."

She arranged it.

"Now tell me what I am holding in my hand."

He watched her.

"Your top cards are the queen of diamonds, knave of hearts, ace of clubs."

He got no praise.

"You stared at me so, a blind man could have seen what you were about. You play this with your face, as well as with your fingers; learn that. Now again."

He told her again.

"Better, but you are too slow. They won't wait for you, while you sit there summing up in your mind. Now another."

Her only praise was a nod. "Once more."

This time, at last, she conceded: "You are not stupid, Louis."

He threw the cards aside suddenly.

"I can't do this, Bonny."

She gave him a scathing look.

"Why? Are you too good? Does it soil you?"

He dropped his eyes before hers, ran desperate fingers through his hair.

"You killed a man once in Mobile, if I remember!" she accused him. "But you cannot sharpen up a card game a little. No, you're too goody-goody."

"That was different somehow--" (And why do you throw that up to me, anyhow? he thought.)

"If there's anything that sickens me, it's a saintly man. You should be wearing your collar back-to-front. Very well. We'll say no more about it. Sit and nurse your two hundred until it is all gone." She flung her chair angrily over to one side, while she rose from it.

He watched her stride to the door, and pluck the knob, and swing the door back to go out.

"You want me to do this very much?" he said. "That much?"

She stopped and turned to look at him. "It is to your advantage, not mine. I was only trying to help you. I gain nothing by it. I can always make out. I have before, and I can again."

Louder than all the rest, he heard in it the one word she had not spoken: alone.

"I'll do it for you, Bonny," he said limply. "I'll do it for you."

She dropped her eyes a moment complacently. She came back and sat down. Her face slowly smoothed out. She bent to her tutoring attentively. "Now what am I holding?"

58

How she found out about the place he never knew. He would never have guessed it existed. She seemed to have a nose for scenting such places from a mile off.

It was on the second floor, up a stair that occasionally someone would come down but no one was ever seen to go up. Below it was just a restaurant and wining place. They'd been there before once or twice in their nightly rounds of pleasure, and not finding it very entertaining, soon left again. If she'd detected anything then, she'd said nothing about it to him at the time.

They came there now, the two hundred secreted on his person, and first took seats below, just the two of them, close to the stairs, over two glasses of Burgundy.

"Are you sure?" he kept asking her in a doubtful undertone.

She gave him a deft little frown of affirmation. "I know. I can tell. I saw the look on one or two faces as they came down those stairs the other night. I have seen those looks on faces before. The face too white, the eyes too bright and feverish." She patted his knee below the table. "Be patient. Do as I told you when the time comes."

They sat for a while, she inscrutable, he uneasy.

"Now," she said finally.

He beckoned the waiter. "The check, please." He took out the entire two hundred dollars, allowed him to see it, while he selected a bill for payment. She, meanwhile, elaborately stifled a yawn. He turned his head to the waiter. "It's dull here. Can't you offer anything--a little more interesting ?"

The waiter went to the manager and spoke in a corner behind the back of his hand. The manager came over in turn, leaned confidentially across the back of Durand's chair.

"Anything I can do, sir ?"

"Can't you offer us anything a little more exciting than this?"

"If you were alone, sir, I'd suggest--"

"Suggest it anyway," Durand encouraged him.

"There are some gentlemen upstairs-- You understand me?"

"Perfectly," said Durand. "I wish I had known sooner. Come, my dear."

"The lady too?" the manager asked dubiously.

"I am very well behaved," she simpered. "I will be quiet as a mouse. No one will know that I am there."

"Tell them Mr. Bradford sent you from below. We do not like too much attention called to it. It is just for the diversion of a few of our steady customers."

They went up together at a propitious moment, when no one seemed to be watching. Durand knocked at a large double door, behind which a buzz of conversation sounded. A man opened it and looked out at them, holding it so that they could not see within.

"Mr. Bradford sent us from below."

"We don't allow ladies in here, sir."

She smiled her most dazzling smile. Her eyes looked into his. Her hand even came to rest upon his forearm for a moment. "There are exceptions to every rule. Surely you are not going to keep me out? I should be so lonely without him."

"But the gentlemen's conversation may--"

She pinched his chin playfully. "There, there. I have heard my husband swear before; it will not shock me."

"Just a moment."

He closed the door; reopened it in a moment to offer her a black velvet eye-mask. "Perhaps you would be more comfortable with this."

She gave Durand a satiric side look, as if to say "Isn't he naïve?" but put it on nevertheless.

The man stood aside, to hold back the door for them.

"Need you have been so coquettish ?" Durand said to her in a rapid aside.

"It got me in, didn't it?"

Her entrance created a sensation. He had seen her attract attention wherever they went, but never anything comparable to this. The buzz of conversation stilled into a dead silence. The play even stopped short at several of the tables. One or two of the men reached falteringly behind them, as if to draw on their coats, though they did not complete the intention.

She said something behind her hand to their host, who announced in a clear voice: "The lady wishes you to forget that she is here, gentlemen. She simply enjoys watching card games."

She bowed her head demurely, in a feigned sort of modesty, and went on, her arm linked to Durand's.

Their guide introduced him at one of the tables, after having first obtained his name, and the willingness of the other players to accept him. "Mr. Castle--Mr. Anderson, Mr. Hoffman, Mr. Steeves."

Bonny was not introduced, propriety in this case dictating that she be omitted.

"Champagne for the gentlemen," Durand immediately ordered, as soon as he had taken seat.

A colored steward brought it, but she at once took over the task from him, remarking: "That shall be my pleasure, to see that the wants of the gentlemen at this table are attended to." And moved around from one to the next, filling their glasses, after the cards were already well in play. Then sat back some little distance removed, with the air of a little girl upon her best behavior, who has been allowed to sit up late in presence of her elders. If her legs did not actually dangle from her chair, that was the illusion she conveyed.

Durand took out the entire two hundred, with an indifferent gesture, as though it were simply a small fraction of what he had about him, and the game began.

Within minutes, it was no longer two hundred. And at no time after that did it ever again descend to two hundred, though sometimes it swelled and sometimes it shrank back again. It doubled itself in bulk, finally, and then when it had doubled itself again, he made two piles of it, so that he must have had a thousand dollars in winnings there on the table before him. He did not remove any of it from sight, as the etiquette of the game proscribed, the play still being in progress.

The room was warm and unaired, and the players were heated in addition by their own excitement. The champagne thoughtfully there beside them was gratefully downed in hectic gulps at every opportunity. And each time a glass fell empty, a fleeting shadow, less than a shadow, would tactfully withdraw it a short distance behind the player, in order not to interfere with his view of the table, and there refill it. With graceful, dainty, loving little gesture, hand to throat, or bosom, or toward ear, lest a drop be spilled, as the drink was returned to its place. Tapering fingers, one or the other folded shorter than the rest, clasped about its stem.

Occasionally she got an absent, murmured "Thank you," from the player, more often he was not even aware of her, so unobtrusively were his wants tended.

Once she motioned with her fan to the steward, and he brought another bottle, and when the cork popped, she gave a little start of alarm, as pretty as you please, so timorous a little thing was she, so unused to the ways of champagne corks.

But suddenly there was silence at the table. The game had halted, without a word. Each player continued to look at his cards, but no further move was made.

"Whenever you're ready, gentlemen," Durand said pleasantly.

No one answered, no one played.

"I'm waiting for the rest of you, gentlemen," Durand said.

No one looked up, even at sound of his voice. And the answer was given with the speaker's head still lowered to his cards.

"Will you ask the lady to retire, sir ?" the man nearest him said.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you have to be told ?" They were all looking at him now.

Durand started to his feet with a fine surge of forced indignation. "I want to know what you meant by that!"

The other man rose in turn, a little less quickly. "This." He knocked his diffuse cards into a single block against the table, and slapped Durand in the face with them twice, first on one side, then the other.

"If there's one thing lower than a man that'll cheat at cards, it's a man that'll use a woman to do his cheating for him!" Durand tried to swing at him with his fist, the circumstances forgotten now, only the provocation remaining livid on his cheeks--for he had no past history of brooked insult to habituate him to this sort of thing. But the others had leaped up by now too, and they closed in on him and held his arms pinioned. He threshed about, trying to free himself, but all he could succeed in doing was swing their bodies a little too, along with his own; they were too many for him.

The table rocked, and one of the chairs went over. Her scream was faint and futile in the background, and tinny with horrified virtue.

The manager had appeared as if by magic. The struggle stopped, but they still held Durand fast, his marble-white face now cast limply downward as if to hide itself from their scorching stares.

"This man's a common, low-down cheat. We thought you ran a place for gentlemen. You should protect the good name of your establishment better than this."

He didn't try to deny it; at least that much he had left. That was all he had left. His shirt had come open at the chest, and his breast could be seen rising and falling hard. But scarcely from the brief physical stress just now, rather from humiliation. The whole room was crowded about them, every other game forgotten.

The manager signalled to two husky helpers. "Get him out of here. Quickly, now. I run an honest place. I won't have any of that."

He didn't struggle further. He was transferred to the paid attendants, with only the unvarying protest of the manhandled: "Take your hands off me," no more.

But then as he saw the manager clearing the disheveled table, sweeping up what was on it, he called out: "Two hundred of that money is mine, I brought it into the game."

The manager waved him on, but from a distance safely beyond his reach. "You've forfeited it to the house. That'll teach you not to try your tricks again! On your way, scoundrel !"

Her voice suddenly rang out in sharp stridency: "You robbers! Give him back his money!"

"The pot calling the kettle black," someone said, and a general laugh went up, drowning the two of them out.

He was hustled across the floor, and out through a back door, probably to avoid scandalizing the diners below at the front. There was an unpainted wooden slat-stair there, clinging sideward to the building. They threw him all the way down to the bottom, and he lay there in the muddy back-alley. Miraculously unhurt, but smarting with such shame as he'd never known before, so that he wanted to turn his face into the mud and hide it there.

His hat was flung down after him, and after doing so the thrower ostentatiously brushed his hands, as if to avoid contamination.

But that was not the full measure of humiliation, ignominy. The final degradation was to see the door reopen suddenly, and Bonny came staggering through. Impelled forth, thrust forth by the clumsy sweaty hands of men, like any common thing.

His wife. His love.

A knife went through his heart, and it seemed to shrivel and fold and close over upon the blade that pierced it.

Pushed forth into the night, so that she too all but overbalanced and threatened to topple down after him, but clung to the rail and managed to hold herself back just in time.

She stood there motionless for a moment, above him, but looking, not back at them but down below her at him.

Then she came on down and passed him by with a lift of her skirts to avoid him, as though he were some sort of refuse lying there.

"Get up," she said shortly. "Get up and come away. I never heard of a man that can't win either way; can't win honestly, and can't win by cheating either."

He had never known the human voice could express such corrosive contempt before.

59

He foresaw the change in her that would surely follow this debacle before it had even come, so well did he know her now, so bitterly, so costly well. Know her by mood and know her by nature. And come it did, only a little less swiftly and surely than his apprehension of its coming.

The first day after, she was simply less communicative, perhaps; a shade less friendly. That was all. It was as if this was the period of germination, the seed at work but unseen as yet. Only a lover's eye could have detected it. And his was a lover's eye, though set in a husband's head.

But by that night, already, a chill was beginning. The temperature of her mood was going down steadily. Her remarks were civil, but in that alone was the gauge. Civility bespeaks distance. Husband and wife should never be civil. Sugared, or soured, but civil not.

By the second day dislike had begun to sprout like a noxious weed, overrunning everything in what was once a pleasant garden. Her eyes avoided him now. To bring them his way he had to make use of the question direct in addressing her, nothing less would do. And even then they refused to linger, as if finding it scarcely worth their while to waste their time on him.

Within but an additional day of that, the weeds had flowered into poisonous, rancid fruit. The cycle of the sowing was complete, all that was needful was the reaping; and who would the scythe wielder be? There was a sharp edge to her tongue now, the velvet was wearing thin in places. The least provocative remark of his might touch one of them, strike a flinty answer.

It was as though this had the better even of her herself; as though, at times, she tried to curb it, make an effort, at intervals, toward relenting, softening: only to find her own nature opposed to her intentions in the matter, and overcoming them in spite of the best she could do. She would smile and the blue ice in her eyes would warm, but only for fleeting minutes; the glacial cast that held her would close over her again and hide her from him.

He took refuge in long walks. They were a surcease, for when he took them he was not without her; when he took them he had her with him as she had been until only lately. He would restore, replenish the old she, until he had her whole again. Then coming back, with a smile and a lighter heart, the two would meet face to face, the old and the new, and in an instant he would have his work all for nothing, the new she had destroyed the old.

"I'll get a job, if this affects you so much," he blurted out at last. "I'm capable, there's no reason why I--"

He met with scant approval.

"I hate a man that works!" she said through tight-gripped teeth. "I could have married a dray horse if I'd wanted that. It'd be just about as dull." Then gave him a cutting look, as if he had no real wish to better their state, were purposely offering her alternatives that were useless, that were not to be seriously considered. "There must be some way besides that, that you could get your hands on some money for us."

He wondered uneasily what she meant by that, and yet was afraid to know, afraid to have it made any clearer.

"Only fools work," she added contemptuously. "Someone once told me that a long time ago, and I believe it now more than ever."

He wondered who, and wondered where he was now. What jail had closed around him long since, or what gallows had met him. Or perhaps he was still unscathed, his creed vindicated, waiting somewhere for word from her, in tacit admission that she had been wrong; knowing that some day, somehow, in his own good time, he would have it.

"He must have been a scalawag," was all he could think to say.

There was defiance in her cold blue eyes. "He was a scalawag," she granted, "but he was good company."

He left the room.

And now there was stone silence between them, following this; not so much as a "By your leave," not so much as a "Good night." It was hideous, it was unthinkable, but it had come about. Two mutes moving about one another, two pantomimists, two sleepless silhouettes in the dimness of their chamber. He sought to reach for her hand and clasp it, but she seemed to be asleep. Yet in her sleep she guessed his intention, and withdrew her hand before he could find it.

On the following day, coming from the back of the hall, he happened to pass by the sitting room, on his way out to take one of his restorative walks, and caught sight of her in there, sitting at the desk. He hadn't known her to be in there. She was not writing a letter, by any evidence that was to be seen. She was sitting quite aimless, quite unoccupied. The desk slab was out, but no paper was in view. Yet for what other purpose do people sit at a desk, he asked himself? There were more appropriate chairs in the room for the purpose, in itself, of sitting.

He had an unhappy feeling that some action she had been engaged in had been hastily resumed as soon as he was gone. The very cast of her countenance told him that; its resolute vacancy. Not a natural vacancy, but a studied one, carefully maintained just for so long as he was in the doorway watching. The pinkey of her hand, which rested sideward along the desk slab, rose and descended again, as he watched. The way the tip of a cat's tail twitches, when all the rest of it is stilled; betraying a leashed, lurking impatience.

There was nothing he could do. If he stopped her this time, she would find another. If he accused, she would deny. If he proved, then her smouldering resentment would burst into open flame, and he didn't want that.

A letter to the past. A letter to that other, subterranean world he thought she had left forever.

He went out and closed the door behind him, heavy hearted.

If there was an added quality to be detected in her, several hours later, on his return, it was a glint of malicious satisfaction, a sort of sneer within the eyes. The look of one who says to herself, I have not been idle. Just wait, and you shall see.

Within another two days he could stand their estrangement no longer, he had capitulated. He had capitulated in a lie; he had prostituted the truth itself to his submission, than which there can be no greater capitulation on the part of one to the desires of another. Making what is not so, so, for the sake of renewed amity.

"I lied to you, Bonny," he said without preamble.

She was stroking her hair in readiness for bed, her back was to him. Literally now, as it had been figuratively for days on end.

"There is more money. That was not the end of it."

She set down her brush smartly, turned to stare.

"Then why did you tell me that? What did you do it for ?"

"I thought perhaps we might run through it too quickly. I thought perhaps we should put it by for a little while, for some later day."

Greed must have dulled her perceptions. He made a poor liar, at best. And now, because of the stake involved, he was at his worst. Yet she wanted to believe him, and so she wholeheartedly did. Instantly she had accepted for fact his faltering figment; that could be told by the swiftness with which she entered into argument over it. And you do not argue over something that is not a fact, you disregard it; you argue only over something that is.

"Later?" she said heatedly. "How much later? Will we be any younger when it comes, that precious day? Will a dress look as good on me then as it does now? Will my skin be as smooth, will your step be as firm ?"

She picked up her brush again, but not for use; to fling it down in emphasis.

"No, I've never lived that way and I won't submit to it now! 'A rainy day.' I've heard that old fusty saying. I'll give you another, a truer one! 'Tomorrow never comes.' Let it rain tomorrow! Let it soak and drench me! If I'm dry and warm tonight, that's all I care about. Tomorrow's rain may never find me. I may be dead tomorrow, and so may you. And you can't spend money in a grave. I'll take on the bargain. I'll ask no odds. Bury me tomorrow, and welcome. In potter's field, if you want. Without even a shroud to cover me. If I can only have Tonight."

She was breathing fast with the heat and fury of her philosophy. The protest of the disinherited; the panic of the pagan, with no promise of ultramundane reward.

"How much is it?" she asked avidly. "How much, about?"

He wanted her happy. He couldn't give her heaven, so he gave her the only heaven she believed in, understood. "A great deal," he said. "A great deal."

"About?"

"A lot," was all he could keep saying. "A lot."

She had risen, ecstatic, was coming closer to him step by step. Each step a caress. Each step the promise of another caress still to come, beyond the last. She clasped hands over her bosom, as if to hold in the joy swelling it. "Oh, never mind, no need to tell me exactly. I never did like figures. A lot, that's all that matters. A bunch. A load. Where? Here, with us?"

"In New Orleans," he mumbled evasively. "But where I can put my hands on it easily." Anything to hold her. She wanted Tonight. Well, he wanted Tonight too.

She spun, suddenly, in a solo waltz step, as though unseen violins had struck a single chord. Then flung herself half onto the bed and into his waiting arms.

One again; love again. Whisperings, protestations, promises and vows: never another cold word, never another black silence, never another hurt. I forgive you, I adore you, I cannot live without you. "A new you, a new me."

Suddenly she alerted her head for a moment, almost as if an afterthought had assailed her. "Oh, I'm sorry," he heard her breathe, and whether it was to him or to herself, he could not even tell, it was so inward and subdued.

"It's over, it's forgotten," he murmured, "we've agreed on that."

Her head dropped back again, solaced.

But the belatedness of the qualm, coming as it did after all the pardons had been asked and given, and not in their midst, made him think her compunction might have been for something else, and not their state of alienation itself, now happily ended. Some act he'd had no inkling of at the time, now rashly completed beyond recall.

She kept asking when he was going, and when he was going, with increasing frequency and increasing insistence, until at last he was face to face with the retraction he'd dreaded so; there was nothing left for him but to tell her. So tell her he did.

"I'm not."

"But--but how else can you obtain it?"

"There isn't any there to obtain. Not a penny. It's all gone long since, all been used. The money from the sale of the St. Louis Street house, that Jardine took care of for me; my share of the business. There's nothing more coming to me." He buried hands in pockets, drew a deep breath, looked down. "Very well, I lied. Don't ask me why; you should know. To see you smile at me a little longer, perhaps." And he murmured, half-inside his throat, "It was cheap at that price."

She said, still speaking quietly, "So you hoodwinked me."

She put aside her hand mirror. She stood. She moved about, with no settled destination. She clasped her own sides, in double embrace.

The storm brewed slowly, but it brewed suiphurous strong. She paced back and forth, her chest rising and falling with quickened breath, but not a word coming from her at first.

She seized her cut-glass flask of toilet water at last, and raising arm up overhead to full height, crashed it down upon the dresser top.

"So that's what you think of me. A good joke, wasn't it? A clever trick. Tell her you have money, tell her you haven't. The fool will believe anything you say. One minute yes, the next minute no." The talcum jar came down next, shattered into crystal shrapnel, some of which jumped almost to his feet, across the room. Then the hand mirror. "It isn't enough to lie to me once, you have to lie to me twice over!"

"The first time was the truth; the only lie was when I said I did have."

"You got what you wanted, though, didn't you? That was all you cared about, that was all that mattered to you!"

"Haven't you got any modesty at all? Isn't there anything you leave unsaid ?"

"You'd better make it do, I warn you! It'll be a long long time--"

"You've got a filthy mouth for such a beautiful face," he let her know sternly. "A slut's tongue in a saint's face."

She threw a scent bottle, this time directly at him. He didn't swerve; it struck the wall just past his shoulder. A piece of glass nicked his cheek, and drops of sweet jasmine spattered his shoulder. She was not play-acting in some lovers' quarrel; her face was maniacal with hate. She was beside herself. If there had been anything sharp at hand to use for weapon--

"You--" She called him a name that he'd thought only men knew. "I'm not good enough for you, am I? I'm beneath you. I'm just trash and you're a fine gentleman. Well, who told you to come after me? Who wants you?"

He took a handkerchief to the tiny spot of blood on his cheek. He held his peace, stood there steadfast against the sewage torrents of her denunciation.

"What good are you to me? You're no good to me at all. You and your romantic love. Faugh!" She wiped her hand insultingly across her mouth, as though he had just kissed her.

"No, I suppose I'm not," he said, eyes hard now, face bitter. "The wind has changed now. Now that I have nothing left. Now that you've had everything out of me that's to be had. You greedy little leech. Are you sure you haven't overlooked anything?" He was trembling now with emotion. His hands sought into his pockets, turning their linings out with the violence of their seeking. "Here." He dragged some coins out, flung them full at her face. "Here's something you missed. And here, have this too." He ripped the jeweled stickpin from his tie, cast that at her. "And that's all there is. An insurance policy among my papers somewhere, and maybe you'd like me to cut my own throat to profit you--but unfortunately it's not in force."

She was pulling things out of the drawers now, dropping more than she secured.

"I've left you once already, and I'll leave you again. And this time for good, this time goodbye. I don't ever want to see the sight of you again."

"I'm still your husband, and you're not leaving this house."

"Who's to stop me? You?" She threw back her head and shrieked to the ceiling with wild laughter. "You're not man enough, you haven't got the--"

They both ran suddenly for the door, from their two varying directions. He got there first, put his back to it, blocked it.

She raised diminutive fists, battered futilely at his chest, aimed the points of her shoes at his insteps.

"Get out of my way. You can't stop me."

"Get back from this door, Bonny."

The blow, when it came, was as unexpected to him as it must have been to her. It was like a man swiping at a mosquito, before he stops to think. She staggered back, turned as she fell, and toppled sideward onto the bench that sat before her dressing table, the lower part of her body trailing the floor.

They looked at each other, stunned.

His heart, wrung, wanted to cry out "Oh, darling, did I hurt you?" but his stubborn lips would not relay the plea.

The room seemed deathly still, after the clamorous discord that had just filled it. She had become noticeably subdued. Her only reproach was characteristic. It was, rather, a grudging backhand compliment. As she picked herself stiffly up, she mouthed sullenly: "It's a wonder you were man enough to do that much. I didn't think you had it in you."

She came toward the door again, but this time with all antagonism drained from her.

He eyed her under narrowed, ,warning lids.

"Let me get to the bathroom," she said with sulky docility. "I need to put cold water on my face."

When he came up again later from below, she had dragged her bed things out of their room and into the spare bedroom at the back of the hall up there.

60

About four or five days later, he was returning toward the house from one of his walks--walks which had become habitual by now-- when suddenly her figure came into view far ahead of him, some two or three road crossings in advance, but going the same way he was, down the same mottled tunnel made by the overhanging shade trees.

The distance was so great and the figure was so diminished by it, and above all the flickering effect given off by the alternating sun and shade falling over it made it so blurry in aspect, that he could not be altogether sure it was indeed she. Yet he thought he knew her gait, and when someone else had passed her he could tell by that yardstick she was small in proportion to others and not just because of the distance alone, and above all the coloring of the dress was the same as the one he had last seen her in when he'd left the house an hour before: plum serge. In short, there was too much overall similarity; he felt sure it was Bonny.

It was useless to have hailed her; she would not have heard, she was too far ahead. The separation was too great even for him to have hoped to overtake her within a worthwhile time by breaking into a run; she would have been almost back at their own door by the time he had done so. Moreover, there was no reason for undue haste, no emergency, he would see her soon enough, and besides he was somewhat fatigued from his recent walk and disinclined to run just them.

She had not been in sight only a moment before, and the point at which she had suddenly appeared was midway between two of the intervening road crossings, so he surmised she must have emerged from some doorway or establishment at approximately that location just as he caught sight of her.

When he had gained the same general vicinity himself, in due course, he turned to look sideward, out of what was at first merely superficial curiosity, as he went past, to see where it was she had come from, what it was she had been about. Always presuming that it had been she.

Superficial curiosity became outright surprise at a glance, and halted him in his tracks. The building flanking him was the post office. Immediately adjoining it, it is true, was a rather shabbylooking general-purpose store, but since there were several others of the same kind, and far more prepossessing looking, closer at hand to where they lived, it seemed hardly likely she would have put herself out to come all the way to this one. It must have been the post office she had quitted.

There was no reason for her to seek it out but one: subterfuge. There was a mailbox for the taking of their letters on the selfsame street with them; there was a carrier for the bringing of their letters who went past their very door. And what letters did they get anyway? Who knew they were here? Who knew who they were?

Uneasy now, and with the new-found sunlight dimming behind a scurrying of advance clouds, he had turned and gone in before even considering what he was about to do. And then once in, wished he hadn't, and tried to turn about and leave again. But uneasiness proved stronger than his reluctance to spy upon her, and forced him at last to approach the garter-sleeved clerk behind a wicket bearing the legend "General Delivery."

"I was looking for someone," he said shamefacedly. "I must have--missed her. Has there been a little blonde lady--oh, no higher than this--in here within the past few minutes?"

He remembered that day he had taken her to the bank with him in New Orleans. She must have had the same effect in here just now. She would be remembered, if she'd been in at all.

The clerk's eyes lit up, as with an afterglow. "Yes, sir," he said heartily. "She was at this very window just a few minutes ago." He spruced up one of his arm bands, then the other. "She was asking for a letter."

Durand's throat was dry, but he forced the obstructive question from it. "And did she-- Did you have one for her?"

"Sure enough did." The clerk wagged his head in reflective admiration, made a popping sound with his tongue against some empty tooth-shell in his mouth. "'Miss Mabel Greene,' "he reminisced. "She must be new around here, I don't recall ever--"

But Durand wasn't there anymore.

She was in the ground-floor sitting room. Bonnet and stole were gone, as if she had never had them on. She was standing before the center table frittering with some flowers that she had put there in a bowl the day before, some jonquils, withdrawing those that showed signs of wilting. There was a scorched, cindery odor in the air, as if something small had burned a few moments ago; his nostrils became aware of it the moment he entered.

"Back ?" she said friendlily, turning her face over-shoulder to him, then back to the flowers once more.

He inhaled twice in rapid succession, in quite involuntary confirmation of the foreign odor.

Though she was not looking at him, she must have heard. Abruptly she quitted the flowers, went to the window, and raised it generously. "I was just smoking a cigar in here," she said, unasked. "It needs airing."

There was no trace of the remnants of one, on the usual salvers she used.

"I threw it out the window unfinished," she said. She had gone back to the flowers again. "It was quite unfit. They're making them more poorly all the time."

But the effluvia of her own cigars had never bothered her until now. And this was not the aromatic vestiges of tobacco, it was the more acrid pungency left behind by incinerated paper.

I'll know she lies now, I'll know, he thought mournfully. She cannot evade this. Ah, why do I ask her? Why must I seek my own punishment? But the question was already out and uttered, he could not have held it back had his tongue been torn from its roots a moment later.

"Was that you I saw on the street just now?"

She took a moment to answer; though how could she be uncertain, if she had just returned? She took out one more flower. She turned it about by its stem, studying it for faults. She put it down. Then she turned about and faced him, readily enough. She saw his eyes rest for a moment on her plum-serge costume. It was only then she answered.

"Yes."

"Where were you, to the post office?"

Again she took a moment. As though visualizing the topography of the vicinity she had recently been in, reminding herself of it.

"I had an errand," she said, steadily enough. "There was something I needed to buy."

"What ?" he asked.

She looked down at the flowers. "A pair of garden shears, to clip the stems of flowers."

She had chosen well. They would sell those in a general store. And there had been a general store next to the post office.

"And did you ?"

"They had none on hand. They offered to send away for some, but I told them it was not worth the trouble."

He waited. She intended to say nothing more.

"You didn't go to the post office ?"

But in the repetition of the question itself, in fact in its first asking, lay by indirection her answer. He realized that himself. By the very fact of asking, he apprised her that he knew she had.

"I did step into the post office," she said negligently. "It comes to me now. I had forgotten about it. To buy stamps. They are in my purse now. Do you wish to see them?" She smiled, as one who is prepared for all eventualities.

"No," he said unhappily. "If you say you bought stamps, that ends it."

"I think I'd better show them to you." Her voice was neither injured nor hostile; rather, whimsical, amused. As one who patiently endures another's foibles, forgives them.

She opened the receptacle, took out its change purse, showed him two small crimson squares, adhering on a perforated line.

He scarcely looked. She could have bought those a half-hour ago. She could have had them for a month.

"The man said he had given you a letter."

"He did ?" Her brows went up facetiously.

"I described you to him."

"He did," she said coolly.

"It was addressed to Mabel Greene."

"I know," she agreed. "That is why I returned it to him. He mistook me for somebody else. I stopped for a moment, close to his window, without noticing where I was, while I was putting the stamps away. My back was to him, you see. He suddenly called out: 'Oh, Miss Greene, I have a letter for you,' and thrust it out at me. He took me so by surprise that I took it in my hand for a moment without thinking. Then I said, 'I am not Miss Greene,' and handed it back to him. He apologized, and that ended it. Although on second thought, I don't think his mistake was an honest one. I think he was trying to--" she modulated her voice in reluctant delicacy "--flirt with me. He promptly tried to strike up a conversation with me, by starting to tell me how much I resembled this other person. I simply turned my head away and walked on."

"He didn't say you had returned it."

"But I say I did." There was no resentment in her voice, no emotion whatever. "And you have the choice there: which one of us to believe."

He hung his head. He'd lost the battle of wits, as he might have known he would. She was absolutely without consciousness of guilt. Which did not mean she was without guilt, but only without the fear that usually goes with it and helps unmask it. He could have brought her face to face with that clerk, and the situation would not have altered one whit. She would have flung back her denial into the very face of his affirmation, trusting that to weaken first of the two.

On her way out of the room, she let her hand trail, almost fondly, across the breadth of his back.

"You don't trust me, do you, Lou ?" she said quite neutrally.

"I want to."

She shrugged, in the doorway, as she went out. "Then do so, that is all you have to do. It's simple enough."

She went up the stairs, in leisurely complacency. And though he couldn't see her face, he had never been surer of anything than that it bore on it a smile of the same leisurely complacency just then, to match her pace.

He flung himself down at a crouch before the fireplace, made rapid circling motions with his hands over its brick flooring. There was some brittle paper-ash lying on its otherwise scoured, blackened surface; very little, not enough to make a good-sized fistful. He turned up a piece that had not been consumed, perhaps because it had been held by the burner's fingers to the last. It was a lower corner, nothing more; two straight edges sheared off transversely by an undulant scorched line.

It bore a single word, in conclusion. "Billy." And even that was not wholly intact. The upper closure of the "B" had been opened, eaten into by the brown stain of flame.

61

Nothing more, then, for five days. No more visits to the post office. No more idle sittings beside a desk. No more letters sent, no more letters received. Whatever had been said was said, and only the inside of a fireplace knew what that had been.

For five days after that she did not even go out, she took no more walks. She loitered about the rooms, noncommunicative, self-assured. As if waiting for something. As if waiting for an appointed length of time to pass. Five days to pass.

Then on the fifth day, suddenly, without a word, the door of her room opened after long closure and he beheld her coming down the stairs arrayed for excursion. She was carefully dressed, far more carefully, far more exquisitely, than he had seen her for a long time past. She had taken a hot curling iron to her hair; ripples of artifice indented it. Her lips were frankly red, not merely covertly so. As if to meet a different standard than his own. Rouge that did not try to look like nature but tried to look like rouge. Her floral essence was strong to the point of headiness; again a different standard than his own.

She was going out. She made that plain, over and above his own powers of observation. As if she wanted no mistake about it, no hindrance. "I'm going out," she said. "I'll be back soon."

He did not ask her where.

That was about three in the afternoon.

At five she was not back yet. At six. At seven.

It was dark, and he lit the lamps, and they burned their way toward eight. She wasn't back yet.

He knew she hadn't left him; he knew she was coming back. Somehow that wasn't his fear. Something about the way she had departed, the open, ostentatious bearing she had maintained, was enough to tell him that. She would have gone off quietly, or he would not have seen her go off at all, if she were never coming back.

Once he went to her bureau drawer, and from far in the back of it took out the little case, the casket of burned wood, she kept her adornments in. Her wedding band was in there, momentarily discarded. But so was the solitaire diamond ring he had given her in New Orleans the first day of her arrival.

No, she hadn't left him; she was coming back. This was just an excursion without her wedding band.

On toward nine there was a sound at the door. Not so much an opening of it, as a fumbling incompletion of the matter of opening it.

He went out into the hall at last to see. To see why she did not finish coming in, for he knew already it was she.

She was half in, half out, and stopping there, her back sideward against the frame. Apparently resting. Or as if having given up the idea of entering the rest of the way as being too much trouble.

"Are you ill, Bonny ?" he asked gravely, advancing toward her, but not hastily. Rather with a sort of reproachful dignity.

She laughed. A surreptitious, chuckling little sound, exchanged between herself and some alter ego, that excluded him. That was even at his expense.

"I knew you were going to ask me that."

He had come close to her now.

The floral essence had changed, as if from long exposure; fermented; there was an alcohol base to it now.

"No, I'm not ill," she said defiantly.

"Come away from the door. Shall I help you?"

She brushed his offered arm away from her, advanced past him without it. There was a stiffness to her gait. It was even enough, but there was a self-consciousness to it. As if she were saying: "See how well I can walk." She reminded him of a mechanical doll, wound up and striking out across the floor.

"I'm not drunk, either," she said suddenly.

He closed the door, first looking out. There was no one out there. "I didn't say you were."

"No, but that's what you're thinking."

She waited for him to reply to that, and he didn't. Either answer, he could tell, would have been an equal irritant; whether he contradicted or admitted it. She wanted to quarrel with him; her mood was one of hostility. Whether implanted or native, he could not tell.

"I never get drunk," she said, turning to face him from the sittingroom door. "I've never gotten drunk in my life."

He didn't answer. She went on into the sitting room.

When he entered it in turn, she was seated in the overstuffed chair, her head back a little, resting. Her eyes were open, but not on what she was doing; they were sighted remotely upward. She was stripping off her gloves, but not with the usual attentiveness he had seen her give to this. With an air of supine frivolity, allowing their empty fingers to dangle loosely and flutter about.

He stood and watched her for a moment.

"You're late," he said at last.

"I know I'm late. You don't have to tell me that."

She flung the gloves down on the table, jerked them from her with a little wrist-recoil of anger.

"Why don't you ask me where I've been ?"

"Would you tell me?" he retorted.

"Would you believe me?" she flung back at him.

She took off her hat next. Regarded it intently, and unfavorably; circling its brim, the while, about one supporting hand.

Then unexpectedly, he saw her, with her other hand, hook two fingers together and snap them open against it, striking it a little spanking blow with her nail, so to speak, of slangy depreciation. A moment later she had cast it from her, so that it fell to the floor a considerable distance across the room from her.

He made no move to get it. It was her hat, after all. He merely looked after it, to where it had fallen. "I thought you liked it. I thought it was your fondest rage."

"Hoch," she said with throaty disgust. "In New York they're wearing bigger ones this season. These little things are out."

Who told you that? he said to her in bitter silence. Who told you that you're wasting yourself, buried down here, away from the big towns you used to know? He could hear the very words, almost as though he had been there when they were spoken.

"Can I get you anything ?" he offered after awhile.

"You can't get me anything." She said it almost with a sneer. And he could read the unspoken remainder of the thought: I can get anything I want without you. Without your help.

He let her be. Some influence had turned her against him. Or rather had fanned to renewed heat the antagonism that was already latent there. It wasn't the liquor. It was more than that. The liquor was merely the lubricant.

He came back in a few minutes bringing her a cup of coffee he had boiled. It was a simple operation, and the only one he was capable of in that department. He had watched her do it, and thus he knew: pour water in, dribble coffee in, and stand it over the open scuttle hole.

And yet where some others--some others he had never known-- might have recognized the wistful charm there was, unconsciously, in the effort, she rebelled and was disgusted almost to the point of nausea.

"Ah, you're so damned sweet it sickens me. Why don't you be a man? Why don't you give a woman a taste of your trouser belt once in awhile? It might do the two of us a lot more good."

"Is that what they used to--?" he started to say coldly. He didn't finish it.

She drank the coffee down nevertheless. Nor thanked him for the trouble.

After a period of somnolent ingestion, it had its fortifying effect. She became voluble suddenly. As if seeking to undo whatever harmful impression her lack of inhibition had at first created. The antagonism disappeared, or at least submerged itself from sight.

"I had a drink," she admitted. "And I'm afraid it was too much for me. They insisted."

She waited to see if he would ask who "they" were. He didn't.

"I had started on my way home, this was at five, hours ago, and I think my mistake was in deciding to walk the entire way, instead of taking a carriage. I may have overtaxed myself. Or I may have been laced too tightly. I don't know. At any rate, as I was going along the street, I suddenly began to feel faint and everything swam before my eyes. I don't know what would have happened, I think I should have fallen to the ground. But fortunately a refined woman happened to be just a few steps behind me, on the same walk. She caught me in her arms and she held me up, kept me from falling. As soon as I was able to use my feet again, she insisted on taking me into her home, so that I might rest before going on. She lived only a few doors from there; we were almost in front of her house when it happened.

"Her husband came soon afterward, and they wouldn't hear of my leaving until they were sure I was fit. They gave me this drink, and it must have been stronger than I realized. They were really the kindest people. Their name is Jackson, I think she said. I'll point out the house to you sometime. They have a lovely home."

Warming to her recollection, she began describing it to him. "They took me into their front parlor and had me rest on the sofa. I wish you could see it. All kinds of money, you can tell. Oh, our place is nothing like it here. Louis XV furniture, gilded, you know, with mulberry upholstery. Full-length pier glasses on either side of the mantelpiece, and gas logs in the fireplace, iron logs that you can turn on or off--"

He could see in his mind's eye, as she spoke, the shabby, secretive hotel room, hidden away in one of the byways down around the railroad station; the shade drawn against discovery from the street; the clandestine rendezvous, unwittingly prolonged beyond the bounds of prudence in forgetfulness lent by liquor. She and the man, whoever he was--

The flame of an old love rekindled, with alcohol for fuel; the renewal of old ties, the whispers and the sniggered laughter, the reminiscences shared together-- He could see it all, he was all but there, looking over their shoulders.

The factor of her physical unfaithfulness wasn't what shattered him the most. It was her mental treachery that desolated him; it was the far more irremediable of the two. She had betrayed him far more grievously with her mind and her heart, than she ever could have with her body. For he had always known he was not the first man to come into her life; but what he had always wanted, hoped and prayed for was to be the last.

It was easy, in retrospect, to trace the steps that had led to it. His lie about the money, a palliative that had only made things worse instead of bettering them. And then their bitter, brutal quarrel when he'd had to recant it at last, leaving her smarting and filled with spite and thirsting to requite the trick she felt he'd played on her. There must have been a letter North at about that time, and though he'd never seen it, he could guess what rancorous summons it contained: "Come get me; I can stand no more of this; take me out of it." And then, five days ago, the answer; the mysterious letter to "Mabel Greene."

She needn't go to the post office any more, stealthily to appropriate them. There would be no more sent. The sender was here with her now, right in the same town.

Yes, he thought with saddened understanding, I too would travel from a distance of five days away--or twenty times five days away-- to be with a woman like Bonny. What man wouldn't? If the new love cannot provide for her, she has but to call back the old.

She saw by his face at last that he wasn't listening to her any more. "I'm chattering too much," she said lamely. "I'm afraid I'm palling on you."

"That you never do," he answered grimly. "You never pall on me, Bonny." And it was true.

She stifled a yawn, thrusting her elbows back. "I guess I may as well go up to bed."

"Yes," he agreed dully. "That might be best."

And as he heard her room door close upstairs, a moment after, his head sank slowly, inconsolably down into the refuge his bedded arms made for it upon the table top.

62

He made no reference the following day to her liquored outing, much less the greater transgression that it had encased. He waited to see if she would attempt to repeat it (in his mind some halfformed intent of following her and killing the man when he found him), but she did not. If a succeeding appointment had been made, it was not for that next day.

She lay abed until late, leaving his needs to the tender care of the slovenly woman of all work who came in to clean and cook for them on alternate days, thrice a week. Even this disreputable malaise, which was purely and simply a "head," as they called it, the result of her over-indulgence, he did not tax her with.

When she came down at last to supper with him, she was amiable enough in all conscience. It was as if (he told himself) she had two selves. Her sober self did not know or recall the instinctive animosity her drunken self had unwittingly revealed the night before. Or, if it did, was trying to make amends.

"Did Amelia go ?" she asked. It was a needless question, put for the sake of striking up conversation. The stillness in the kitchen and the fact that no one came in to wait at table, gave its own answer.

"At about six," he said. "She set our places, and left the food warming in there on the stove."

"I'll help you bring it in," she said, seeing him start out to fetch it.

"Are you up to it ?" he asked.

She dropped her eyes at the rebuke, as if admitting she deserved it.

They waited on themselves. She shyly offered the bread plate to him across-table. He pretended not to see it for a moment, than relented, took a piece, grunted: "Thanks." Their eyes met.

"Are you very angry with me, Lou?" she purred.

"Have I reason to be? No one can answer that but yourself."

She gave him a startled look for a moment, as if to say "How much do you know?"

He thought to himself, What other man would sit here like this, meekly holding his peace, knowing what I do? Then he remembered what he himself had told Jardine on that visit to New Orleans: I must do as I must do. I can do no other.

"I was not very admirable," she said softly.

"You did nothing so terrible," he let her know, "once you were back here. You were a little sulky, that was all."

"And I did even less," she said instantly, "before I was back here. It was only here that I misbehaved."

How well we understand one another, he thought. We are indeed wedded together.

She jumped up and came around behind his chair, and leaning over his shoulder, had kissed him before he could thwart her.

His heart, like gunpowder, instantly went up, a flash of flame in his breast, though there was no outward sign to show it had been set off. How cheaply I am bought off, he thought. How easily appeased. Is this love, or is this a crumbling of my very manhood?

He sat there wooden, unmoving, hands to table, keeping them resolutely off her.

His lips betrayed him, though he tried to curb them. "Again," they said.

She lowered her face to his once more, and again she kissed him.

"Again," he said.

His lips were trembling now.

Again she kissed him.

Suddenly he came to life. He had seized her with such violence, it was almost an attack rather than an embrace. He pulled her bodily downward into his lap, and buried his face against hers, hungrily devoured her lips, her throat, her shoulders.

"You don't know what you do to me. You madden me. Oh, this is no love. This is a punishment, a curse. I'll kill any man who tries to take you from me--I'll kill you yourself. And I'll go with you. There shall be nothing left."

And as his lips repeatedly returned to find her, his only words of endearment, spaced each time with a kiss, were: "Damn you! . . . Damn you! . . . Damn you! No man should ever know you!"

When he released her at last, exhausted, she lay there limp, cradled in his arms. On her face the strangest, startled look. As though his very violence had done something to her she had not counted on.

She said, speaking trancelike, and slowly drawing her hand across her brow as if to restore some memory that was necessary to her, and that he had all but seared away, "Oh, Louis, you are not too safe to know yourself. Oh, darling, you almost make me forget--"

And then the crippled, staggering thought died unfinished.

"Forget whom?" he accused her. "Forget what?"

She looked at him dazed, as though not knowing she had spoken, herself. "Forget--myself," she concluded limply.

That is not whom she meant, he told himself with melancholy wisdom. But that word is the true one, nonetheless. I have no real rival, but in her. It is only herself that stands in the way of allowing her to love me.

She did not go out of the house the next day. Again he waited, again he held his breath, but she remained dutifully at hand. The appointment, if there was to be another, still hung fire.

Nor the next, either. The cleaning woman came, and coming down the stairs, he caught sight of them standing close together in the hall, as if they had been secretively conferring together. He thought he saw Bonny hastily fumble with her bodice, as if concealing something she had just received.

She would have carried it off, perhaps, but the Negress made a poor conspirator, she started theatrically back from her mistress, at sight of him, and thus put the thought in his head that something had passed between them.

There are other ways of communicating than by the rendezvous direct, he reminded himself. Perhaps the appointment I have been dreading so has already been kept, right before my eyes, on a mere scrap of paper.

Toward the latter part of their evening meal, that same day, she became noticeably pensive. Again the woman, the go-between of treachery, had gone, again they were alone together.

Her casual remarks, such as any meal shared by any two people is seasoned with, grew more and more infrequent. Soon she was making none at all of her own volition, only answering the ones he made. Presently even this proportion had begun to diminish, he was carrying the entire burden of speech for the two of them. All he got now were absent nods and vague affirmatives, while her thoughts were obviously elsewhere.

Finally it even affected her eating, began to slow and diminish it, so great was her own contemplation of whatever it was that her mind saw before it. And it must have seen something, for the mind by its very nature cannot contemplate vacancy. Her fork would remain in position to detach a portion of food, yet not complete the act for several minutes. Or it would halt in air, midway to her mouth, and again remain that way.

Then, quite as insolubly as it had begun, it had ended again, this abstraction. It was over. Whatever byways her train of thought had wandered down, were now closed off; or else it had arrived at its destination.

Her eyes now saw him when they rested on him.

"Do you recall that night we quarrelled ?" she said, speaking softly. "You said something then about that old insurance policy you once took out when we were living on St. Louis Street. Was that true? Do you really still have it? Or did you just make that up, as you did about there still being money left?"

"I still have it," he said inattentively. "But it has lapsed, for lack of keeping up with the payments."

She was now busily eating, as if to make up for the time she had wasted loitering over her food before. "Is it completely worthless, then ?"

"No, if the back payments were made up it would come into effect again. Not too much time has passed, I think."

"How much would be required?"

"Five hundred dollars," he answered impatiently. "Have we got that much?"

"No," she said docilely, "but is there any harm in asking?"

She pushed her plate back. She dropped her eyes, as if he had rebuffed her, and allowed them to rest on her clasped hands. Then taking one finger in the others, she began slowly to twist and turnabout the diamond ring that had once been his wedding gift to her. She shifted it this way, that, speculatively, abstractedly.

Who could say whether she saw it or not, as she did so? Who could say what she saw? Who could say what her thoughts were? It told nothing. Just a woman's restless gesture with her ring.

"How would one go about it? I mean if we did have the money. In what way is it done ?"

"You simply send the money to New Orleans, to the insurance company. They credit the payments against the policy."

"And then the policy comes into force again?"

"The policy comes into force again," he said somewhat testily, annoyed by her persistence in clinging to the subject.

He had divined, of course, what her sudden interest was. She was entertaining a vague hope that they could borrow against it in some way, obtain money by that means.

"Could I see it?" she coaxed.

"Right now? It's upstairs somewhere, among my old papers. But it's of no value, I warn you; the payments have not been maintained."

She did not press him further. She sat there meditatively fingering the diamond on her finger, shifting it a little bit this way, a little bit that, so that it gave off sparks of brilliance in the lamplight.

She did not ask him for it nor about it again, but remembering that she had, he set about looking for it on his own account. This was not immediately, but some two or three days later.

He couldn't find it. He looked where he'd thought he had it, first, and it wasn't there. Then he looked elsewhere, nor could he find it in any of the other places he looked, either.

It must have been lost, during their many hurried moves from place to place, in the course of hasty packing and unpacking. Or else it would perhaps yet turn up, in some unlikely place he had not yet thought of looking for it.

He desisted finally, with no great concern; with, if anything, a mental shrug. Since it was worthless and could not have been borrowed against (which he thought had been the motive behind her asking about it), there was no great loss, in any case.

He did not even mention to her that he could not locate it. There was no reason to, for she too seemed to have forgotten her earlier interest in it, as she sat there across the table from him, idly stroking and contemplating her ringless hands.

Within the week, the cook and cleaning woman (one and the same) whom they'd had until then, was suddenly gone, and they were alone now in the house.

He asked her about this, after two successive days without her, only noting her departure, man-like, after it had already taken place. "What's become of Amelia ?"

"I shipped her Tuesday," she said shortly.

"But I thought we owed her three or four weeks back wages. How were you able to pay her ?"

"I didn't."

"And she agreed to go nonetheless?"

"She had no choice, I ordered her to. She will get her money when we have it ourselves, she knows that."

"Aren't you getting anyone else?"

"No," she said, "I can manage," and added something under her breath that he didn't hear quite clearly.

"What ?" he asked in involuntary surprise. He thought she had said, "for the little time there is."

"I said, for a little time, that is," she repeated adroitly.

And manage she did, and far more successfully than in their Mobile days, when she had first tried keeping her own house, and he had had to take her back to the hotel for meals.

For one thing, she showed far more purpose than she had in those far-off, light-hearted days; there was less of frivolity in her efforts and a great deal more of determination. There was less laughter in the preparations, maybe, but there was less dismay in the results. She was not a child bride, now, playing at keeping house; she was a woman, bent on acquiring new skills, and not sparing herself in the endeavor.

For two full days she cooked, she washed the dishes, she swung a broom all up and down the stairs. Then on the second night of this apprenticeship--

He heard her scream out suddenly in the kitchen, and there was the crash of a dropped dish as it slipped her hands. She had gone in there to wash up after their meal, and he had remained behind browsing through the paper. Even the most enamored man did not offer to dry the dishes for a woman; it would have been as conventional as assisting at a childbirth.

He flung down his paper and darted in there. She was standing before the steaming washtub. "What is it, did you scald yourself?"

She was pointing, horrified.

"A rat," she choked. "It ran straight between my feet as I stood here. Into there." And with a sickened grimace, "Oh, the size of it! The horrid look!"

He took up a poker and tried to plunge it into the crevice at meeting-place of wall and floor that she had indicated. It balked. There was no depth to take it. It seemed a shallow rent in the plaster, no more.

"It could not have gone in there--"

Her fright turned to anger. "Do you call me a liar? Must it bite me and draw blood, for you to believe me?"

He dropped down now on all fours and began working the poker vigorously to and fro, in truth knocking out a hole if there had been none before.

She watched a moment. "What are you trying to do?" she said coldly.

"Why, kill it," he panted.

"That is not the way to be rid of them!" Her foot gave a clout of impatience against the floor. "You kill one, and there are a dozen left."

She flung down her apron, strode from the room and out to the front of the house. Sensing some purpose he could not divine, but disquieted by it, he put down the poker after a moment, struggled to his feet, and went after her. He found her in the hall, bonnetted and shawled, to his astonishment, in readiness to go out.

"Where are you going ?"

"Since you don't know enough to, I am going to the pharmacist myself, to have him give me something that will exterminate them," she retorted ungraciously.

"Now? At this hour? Why, it's past nine; he'll be closed long ago."

"There is another, on the other side of town, that stays open until ten; you know that as well as I do." And she added with ill-humored decision, as though he were to blame for their presence in some way, "I will not go back into that kitchen and run the risk of being attacked. They will be running over our very bed, yet, while we sleep!"

"Very well, I'll go myself," he offered hastily. "No need for you to go, at this time of night."

She relented somewhat. She took off her shawl, though still frowning a trifle that he had not seen his duty sooner. She took him to the door.

"Don't go back in there," he cautioned, "until I come back."

"Nothing could prevail on me to," she agreed fearfully.

She closed the door after him.

She reopened it to call him back for an instant.

"Don't tell him who we are, what house it's for," she suggested in a lowered voice. "I would not like our neighbors to know we have rats in our house. It's a reflection on me, on my cleanliness as a housekeeper--"

He laughed at this typically feminine anxiety, but promised and went on.

When he came back he found that she had returned to her task in the kitchen nonetheless, in spite of his admonition and her own fear; a bit of conscientious courage which he could not help but secretly admire. She had, however, taken the precaution of bringing in the table lamp with her and placing it on the floor close by her feet, as a sort of blazing protection.

"Did you see any more since I was gone ?"

"I thought I saw it come back to that hole, but I threw something at it, and it did not come out again."

He showed her what the druggist had given him. "This is to be spread around outside their holes and hiding places."

"Did he ask any questions ?" she asked somewhat irrelevantly.

"No, only whether or not we had any children about the house."

"He did not ask which house it was ?"

"No. He's rather elderly and doddering, you know; he seemed anxious to be rid of me and close for the night."

She half extended her hand.

"No, don't touch it. I'll do it for you."

He stripped off his coat, rolled up his shirt sleeves, and squatting on his haunches before the offending orifice, shook out a little powdery trail of the substance here and there. "Are there any others ?"

"One over there, just a little back of the coal stove."

She watched, with housewifely approval.

"That will do. Not too much, or our feet will track it about."

"It has to be renewed every two or three days," he told her.

He put it on the shelf, at last, where the spice canisters were, but well over to the side.

"Make sure you wash your hands, now," she cautioned him. He had been about to neglect doing so, until her reminder. She held the huck-towel for him to dry them on, when he was through.

It was the following night that his illness really began. She discovered it first.

He found her looking at him intently as he closed his book at their retiring-time. It was a kindly scrutiny, but closely maintained. It seemed to have been going on for several moments before he discovered it.

"What is it?" he said cheerfully.

"Louis." She hesitated. "Are you sure you have been feeling well lately? I do not find you looking yourself. I do not like the way you--"

"I ?" he exclaimed in astonishment. "Why, I never felt better in my life!"

She silenced him with tilt of hand. "That may well be, but your appearance belies it. More and more lately I have found you looking worn and haggard at times. I have not mentioned it before, because I didn't want to alarm you, but it has been on my mind for some time now to do so. It's very evident; I can see it quite plainly."

"Nonsense," he said, half laughing.

"I have an excellent remedy, if you will but let me give it to you. And I will join you in it myself, as an inducement."

"What?" he asked, amused.

She jumped up. "Starting tonight, we are to take an eggnog, the two of us, each night before retiring. It is an excellent tonic, they assure me, for fortifying the system."

"I am not an inval--" he tried to protest.

"Now, not another word, sir!" she ordered gaily. "I intend to prepare them right now, and you shall not hinder me. I have all the necessary ingredients right at hand, in there. Fresh-laid eggs, and the very best obtainable, at twelve cents a dozen, mind you! And the brandy we have in the house as well."

He couldn't help but smile indulgently at her, but he let her have her way. This was a new role for her; nursemaid to a nonexistent ailment. If it made her happy, why what was the harm ?"

Her mood was amiable, sanguine, all gentleness and contrition now. She even bent to kiss him atop the head in passing.

"Was I cross to you before? Forgive me, Lou dear. You know I wouldn't want to be. A fright like that can make one into a harridan--" She went toward the kitchen, smiling back at him.

He could hear her cracking the eggs, somewhere beyond the open doorway, and crinkled his eyes appreciatively to himself.

Presently, she had even begun to hum lightly as she moved about in there, she was enjoying her self-imposed task so much.

Soon the humming gained words, had become a full song.

He had never heard her sing before. Laughter until now had always been her expression of contentment, never song. Her voice was light but true. Not very lyrical, metallic was the word that occurred to him instead, but she stayed adroitly on key.

Just a song at twilight,

When the lights are low--

Suddenly the song stopped, as if at something she were doing that required complete concentration. Measuring the brandy, perhaps. Be that as it might, it never resumed again.

She came in, holding one glass in each hand. Their contents pale gold in color, creamy in substance.

"Here. One for you, one for me." She offered them both. "Take whichever one you want." Then when he had, she tasted tentatively at the one that remained in her hand. "I hope I didn't put in too much sugar. Too much would sicken. May I try yours ?"

"Of course."

She took it back from him, tasted at it in turn. It left a little white trace on her upper lip.

While she stood thus, holding both together, she turned her head toward the kitchen door.

"What was that ?"

"What? I didn't hear anything."

She went back in again for a moment. She was gone a moment only. Then she returned to him.

"I thought I heard a sound in there. I wanted to make sure I had fastened the door."

She gave him back the one he had had in the first place, and which she had sampled.

"Since it has brandy in it," she said, "I suppose we should precede it with a toast." She nudged her glass to his. "To your better health."

She drained hers to the bottom.

He took a deep draught of his. He found it quite velvety and pleasurable. The liquor in it, with which she had been unsparing, gave a mellow warming effect to the stomach after it had lain there some moments.

"I wish all tonics were this palatable, don't you ?" she remarked.

"It's quite satisfactory," he admitted, more to please her than because he saw any great virtue in it. It was after all, to his way of thinking, a bastard drink; neither honest liquor nor wholly medicine.

"You must drink it down to the bottom, that is the only way it will do you any good," she urged gently. "See, as I did mine."

To spare her feelings, after the trouble of having prepared it, he did so.

He tasted of his tongue, dubiously, after he had. "It is a little chalky, don't you find. A little--astringent. It puckers."

She took the glass from him. "That is because you are not used to milk. Have you never seen a baby's mouth after it feeds, all clotted and curdled ?"

"No," he assured her with mock gravity, "you have not given me that pleasure."

They laughed together for a moment, in close-knit intimacy.

"I'll just rinse out the glasses," she said, "and then we can go up.,'

He slept soundly at first, feeling at the last the grateful glow the tonic had deposited in his stomach; albeit it seemed to confine itself to there, did not spread outward as in the case of unmixed liquor. But then after an hour or two he awakened into torment. The glow was no longer benign, it had a flaming bite to it. Sleep, once driven off, couldn't come near him again, held back by a fiery sword turning and turning in his vitals.

The rest of that night was an agony, a Calvary. He called out to her, more than once, but she was not near enough to hear him. Helpless and cut off from her, he sank his teeth into his own lip at last, and kept silent after that. In the morning there was dried blood all down his chin.

Across the room, over in the far corner, miles away, stood a chair with his clothes upon it. An ebony wood chair, with apricotplush seat and apricot-plush back. Never heeded much before, but now a symbol.

Miles away it stood, and he looked longingly across the miles, the immeasurable distance from illness to health, from helplessness to ability, from death to life.

All the way across the room, many miles away.

He must get over there, to that chair. It was far away, but he must get over there to it somehow. He looked at it so intently, so longingly, that the rest of the room seemed to fog out, and narrowing concentric circles of clarity seemed just to focus on that chair alone, so that it stood as in the center of a bright disk, a bull's-eye, and all the rest was a blur.

He could not get out of bed legs upright, so he had to leave it head and shoulders first, in a slanting downward fall. Then there was a second, if less violent, fall as his hips and legs came down after the rest of him.

He began to sidle along the floor now, like some groveling thing, a worm or caterpillar, chin touching it at every other moment, hot striving breath stirring the nap of the carpet before him, like a wave spreading out from his face. Only, worms and caterpillars don't hope so, haven't such large hearts to agonize with.

Slowly, flowered pattern by flowered pattern. Each one like an island. And the plain-tinted background in between, each time like a channel or a chasm, leagues in width instead of inches. Some weaver somewhere, years ago, had never known his spaces would be counted so, with drops of human sweat and burning pain and tears of fortitude.

He was getting closer. The chair was no longer an entire chair; its top was too far up overhead now. The circle of vision, straight before him, level with the floor, showed its four legs, and the shoes under it, and part of the seat. The rest was lost in the blurred mists of height.

Then the seat went too, just the legs now remained, and he was getting very near. Perhaps near enough already to reach it with his arm, if he extended that full before him along the floor.

He tried it, and it just fell short. Not more than six inches remained between his straining fingertips and the one particular leg he was aiming them for. Six inches was so little to bridge.

He writhed, he wriggled. He gained an inch. The edge of the flower pattern told him that. But the chair, teasing him, tantalizing him, thefted the inch from him somehow. It still stood six inches away. He had gained one at one end, it had stolen it back at the other.

Again he gained an inch. Again the chair cheated him out of it, replaced it at the opposite end.

But this was madness, this was hallucination. It had begun to laugh at him, and chairs don't laugh.

He strained his arm down to its uttermost sinews, from fingerpad all the way back to socket. He swallowed up the six inches, at the price of years of his life. And this time it jerked back, abruptly. And there was another six inches, a new six inches, still between them.

Then through his blinding tears, he saw at last that there were one pair of shoes too many. Four instead of two. His own, under the chair, and hers, off to the side, unnoticed until now. She must have opened the door so deftly that he had not heard it.

She was arched over above him, from the side. One hand holding her skirts clear, to keep them from betraying her presence until the last possible moment. The other hand, to the back of the chair, had been keeping that from him, unnoticeably, each time he'd thought he'd reached it.

The jest must have been good. Her laughter came out, full-bodied, irrepressible, above him. Then she tried to check it, bite it back, for decency's sake, if nothing else.

"What did you want, your clothes? Why didn't you ask me?" she said mockingly. "You can have no possible use for them, my dear. You're not well enough."

And taking the chair in hand more fully this time, before his broken-hearted eyes swept it all the way back against the wall, a whole yard or two at once this time, hopeless of attainment ever.

But the trousers bedded on the seat fell off somehow, and in falling were kinder to him than she was, they fell upon his extended hand and let themselves be gripped, caught fast by it.

Now she bent to take them from him, and a brief, unequal contest of strength locked the two of them for a moment.

"They are no good to you, my dear," she said with the amusement one shows to a wilful child. "Come, let them be. What can you do with them?"

She drew them away from him little by little, plucked them from his bitterly clinging fingers by main strength at last.

Then when she had him back in bed again, she gave him a smile that burned, that seared, though it was only a sweet, harmless, solicitous thing, and the door closed after her.

Within its luminous halo the chair stood, ebony wood and apricot plush. All the way across the room, leagues away.

63

She came in later in the day and sat by him, cool and crisp of attire, pretty as a picture, a veritable Florence Nightingale, soothing, comforting him, ministering to his wants in every way. In every way but one.

"Poor Lou. Do you suffer much?"

He resolutely refused to admit it. "I'll be all right," he panted. "I've never been ill a day in my life. This will pass."

She dropped her eyes demurely. She sighed in comfortable agreement. "Yes, this will soon pass," she conceded with equanimity.

The image of a contented kitten that has just had a saucer of milk crossed his mind for a moment, for some strange reason; disappeared again into the oblivion from which it had come.

She fanned him with a palm-leaf fan. She brought a basin, and with a moist cloth gently laved and cooled his agonized brow and his heaving chest, each silken stroke lighter than a butterfly's wing.

"Would you like a cup of tea?"

He turned his head sharply aside, revolted.

"Would you like me to read to you? It may take your mind off your distress."

She went below and brought up a book they had there, of poems, and in dulcet, lulling cadences read to him from Keats.

"O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?"

And stopped to innocently inquire: "What does that mean, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'? The sound is beautiful but the words have no sense. Are all poems like that ?"

He put hands over ears and turned his head away, excruciated.

"No more," he pleaded. "I can stand no more. I beg you."

She closed the book. She looked surprised. "I was only trying to entertain you."

When water alone would no longer quench his ravening, everincreasing thirst, she went out and with great difficulty obtained a pail of cracked ice at a fishmonger's, and bringing it back, gave it to him piece by piece to chew and crunch between his teeth.

In every way she ministered to him. In every way but one.

"Get a doctor," he besought her at last. "I cannot fight this out alone. I must have help."

She kept her seat. "Shall we not wait another day? Is this my stouthearted Lou? Tomorrow, perhaps, you will be so much better that--"

He clawed at her garments in mute appeal, until she drew back a little, to keep them from being disarranged. His face formed in weazened lines of weeping. "Tomorrow I shall be dead. Oh, Bonny, I cannot face the night. This fire in my vitals-- If you love me, if you love me--a doctor."

She went at last. She was gone from the room a half-hour. She came back to it again, her shawl and bonnet on, and took them off. She was alone.

"You didn't--?" He died a little.

"He cannot come before tomorrow. He is coming then. I described to him what your symptoms were. He said there is no cause for alarm. It is a torm of--of colic, and it must run its course. He prescribed what we are to do until he sees you-- Come, now, be calm--"

His eyes were on her, bright with fever and despair.

He whispered at last: "I did not hear the front door close after you.

She gave him a quick look, but her answer flowed unimpeded.

"I left it ajar behind me, to save time when I returned. After all, I'd left you alone in the house. Surely--" Then she said, "You saw my bonnet on me just now, did you not?"

He didn't answer further. All his ravaged mind could keep repeating was:

I didn't hear the door close after her.

And then at last, slowly but at last, he knew.

Dawn, another dawn, a second one since this had begun, came creeping through the window, and with it a measure of tensile strength. Strength carefully hoarded a few grains at a time for this supreme effort that faced him now. Strength that was not as strength had used to be, of the body; strength that was of the spirit alone. The spirit, the will to live, to be saved; self-combustive, selfconsuming, breathing purest oxygen of its own essence. And when that was gone, no more to replace it, ever.

Though nothing had moved yet but the lids of his eyes, this was the beginning of a journey. A long journey.

For a while he let his body lie inert, as it was. To begin it too soon would be to court interruption and discovery.

There; her step had sounded in the hall, she was coming out of her room. His lids dropped over his eyes, concealing them.

The door opened and he knew she was looking at him. His face wanted to cringe, but he held it steady.

What a long look. Would she never stop looking? What was she thinking? "You are such a long time dying ?" Or, "My own love, are you not any better today ?" Which was the true thought; which was the true she, and which his false dream of her?

She had entered the room. She was coming toward him.

She was bending over him now, in watchful attention. He could feel the warmth of her breath. He could smell the odor of the violet water she had sprinkled on herself only moments ago and which had scarcely yet dried. Above all, he could feel her eyes almost burning through his skin like a pair of sunray glasses held steady above shavings, to make them scorch and smoke and at last burst into flame. There was that concentration in their steady regard.

He must not stir, he must not flicker.

A sudden weight fell on his heart and nearly stopped it. It was her hand, coming to rest there, trying to see if it was still going. It fluttered like a bird caught under her outspread palm, and if she noted that, she must have thought it erratic and falteringly overexerted. Suddenly her hand left him and he felt her fingers go instead to his eye, to try the reflex of that, perhaps. They gave him warning of their direction, for they brushed the skin there, just below it, a moment too soon. He rolled his pupils upward in their sockets, and a moment later when she had raised one lid and peered, only the sightless white eyeball was revealed.

She took up his hand next and held it perpendicular, from elbow onward, her thumb pressed to its wrist. She was feeling his pulse.

She placed his hand back where she had drawn it from. And though she did not drop it, nor cast it down, yet to him there was somehow only too clearly expressed in the way she did it a fling of disappointment, a shortening of the gesture, as if in annoyance at finding him still alive, no matter by what test she applied.

Her garments whispered in withdrawal, fanned him softly in farewell. A moment later the door closed and she had gone from the room. The wooden stairs sounded off her descending tread, as if knuckles were lightly rapping on them step by step.

Now the flight back to life began.

Fortified by hoarded intensity, the earlier stages of it went well. He threw back the coverings, he forced his body slantingly sideward atop the bed, until it had dropped over the side.

He was now strewn prone on the floor at bedside; he had but to raise himself erect.

He rested a moment. Violent flickering pains, like low-burning log flames licking at the lining of his stomach, assailed him, went up his breathing passage as up a flue, and then died out again into the dull, aching torpor that was with him always and that was at least bearable.

He was on his feet now, and working his way alongside the bed down toward its foot. From there to the chair was an open space, with no support. He let go of the bed's footrail with a defiant backward fling, cast off into the unsupported area. Two untrammeled steps, a lurch. Two steps more, a third, he was hastening into a fall now. But if he could reach the chair first-- He raced the distance to the chair against it, and the chair won. He reached it, gripped it, rocked it; but he stayed up.

He donned his coat, buttoning it over without any shirt below. That was comparatively easy. Trousers too; he managed them by sitting on the chair and drawing them from the floor up. But the shoes were an almost insuperable difficulty. To bend down to them in the ordinary way was an impossibility; the whole length of his body would have been excruciatingly curved.

He guided them, empty, first, by means of his feet, so that they stood perfectly straight, side by side. Then aimed each foot, one at a time, into the opening of its destined shoe, and wormed it in. But they gaped open, and it was impossible to proceed with them thus without imminent danger of being thrown from one step to the next.

He lay down on the floor, on his side. He scissored his legs, brought one up until he had caught his foot with both hands. There were five buttons on each shoe, but he chose only the topmost one, the most accessible, and forced it through its matching eyelet. Then changing legs, did it with the other.

Now he was erect again, accoutred to go, and there only remained lengthwise progress, over distance, to be accomplished. Only; he said the word over to himself with wistful irony.

Like a sleepwalker, taut at every joint; or like a mariner reeling across a storm-slanted deck, he crossed from chair to room door, and leaned inert there for a moment against its frame. Then softly took the knob in his grasp, and turned it, and held it after it was turned, so that it wouldn't click in recoil.

The door was open. He stepped through.

An oval window was let into the center of the hallway's frontal crosswall, to light the stairs and to give an outlook. A curtain of net was fastened taut across its pane.

He reached there, elbowing the wall for support, and put an eye to it, peering hungrily out into life. The curtain, brought so close to the eye's retina, acted like a filter screen; it dismembered the scene outside into small detached squares, separated by thick corded frames, which were the threads of the curtain, magnified at that short distance.

One square contained a segment of the front walk below, nothing else; all evenly slate-colored it was. The one above, again the walk, but at a greater outward distance now, a triangle of the turf bordering it beginning to cut in at the top, in green. The one still above that, turf and walk in equal proportions, with the whitepainted base of one of the gate posts beginning to impinge off in the upper corner. And so on, in tantalizing fragments; but never the world whole, intact.

I want to live again, his heart pleaded; I want to live again out there.

He turned, and let the makeshift be, the quicker to be down below and at the original; and the stairs lay there before him, dropping away like a chasm, a serried cliff. His courage quailed at the sight for a minute, for he knew what they were going to cost. And the distant scrape of her chair in the kitchen below just then, added point to his dismay.

But he could only go onward. To go back was death in itself, death in bed.

He'd reached their tip now, and his eye went down them, all the cascading miles to their bottom. Vertigo assailed him, but he held his ground resolutely, clutching at the newel post with double grip as though it were the staff of life itself.

He knew that he would not be able to go down them upright, as the well did. He would overbalance, topple headfirst for sheer lack of leg support. He therefore lowered his own distance from the ground, first of all. He sat down upon the top step, feet and legs over to the second. He dropped them to the third, then lowered his rump to the second, like a child who cannot walk yet.

As he descended he was drawing nearer, ever nearer to her. For she was down there where he was going.

She sounded so close to him now. Almost, he could see before his very eyes everything she was doing, by the mere sound of it alone.

A busy little tinkering, ending with a tap against a cup rim: that meant she was stirring sugar into her coffee.

A creak from the frame of a chair: that meant that she was leaning forward to drink it.

A second creak: that meant that she had settled back after taking the first swallow.

He could hear bread crust crackle, as she tore apart a roll.

Crumbs lodged in her throat and she coughed. Then leaned forward to clear it with another swallow of her coffee.

And if he could hear her so minutely, how--he asked himself-- could she fail to hear him; this stealthy rustling he must be making on the stairs?

He was afraid even to breathe, and he had never needed breath so badly.

At last the bottom, and he could only lie there a minute, rumpled as an empty sack that had fallen down from above, even if it had meant she would come out upon him any instant.

From where he was now there was only a straight line to travel, to the front door. But he knew he could not gain it upright. He had exhausted himself too much by now, spent himself too much on the way. How then gain support? How get there?

Struggling upright, it came to him of its own accord. He rotated his shoulders along the wall, turning now outward, next inward, then outward again, then inward--he rolled himself along beside the wall, and the wall supported him, and thus he did not fall, and yet progressed.

Midway there was an obstacle, to break his alliance with the wall. It was an antlered coatrack, its lower part a seat that extended far out, its upper part a tall thin panel of wood, set with a mirror. It was unsteady by its very nature, its proportions were untrue, he was afraid he would bring it down with him.

He circled his body awkwardly out and around it, holding it steady, so to speak, and got to the other side. But letting it go in safety was harder than claiming its support had been, and for a second or two he was held in a horrid trap there, afraid to take his hands off it, lest the sudden release of weight cause it to back and sway in revealing disturbance.

He took his near hand off it first, still held it on its far side, and that equalized the removal of pressure. Then cautiously he let go of it in the remaining place, and it did nothing but waver soundlessly for a moment or two, and then stilled again.

Safely free of it, he let himself down at last into a submerged huddle, sheltered now by its projection. Out of prostration, out of sheer inability to go on one additional step, and not out of caution, and yet it was that alone that saved him.

For suddenly, without any warning whatever, she had stepped to the kitchen doorway to the hall and was peering upward along the stairs. She even came forward, clambered up a few inquiring steps until she was in a position from which she could hear better, assure herself all was quiet. Then, satisfied, she came down again, turned about rearward, and went back to where she had been.

He removed the mangled length of shirting he had crushed into his mouth to stifle the hard breath that he would otherwise have been incapable of controlling, and it came away a watery pink.

Within moments after that, his lips were pressed flat against the seam of the outer door, in what was not meant for a kiss, but surely was one just the same.

So little was left to be done now, that he felt sure, even if his heart had already stopped beating and his body were already dead and cooling about him, he would still somehow have gone ahead and done it. Not even the laws of Nature could have stopped him now, so close to his goal.

The latch-tongue sucked back softly, and he waited, head still but held forward, to see if that little sound had reached her, would bring her out again. It didn't.

He pulled, and then, with a swimmingly uncertain motion, the door came away from its frame and an opening stood waiting.

He went through. He staggered forward and fell against the porch post outside, and stayed there inert, letting it hold him.

In a moment he had stumbled down the porch steps.

In another he had lurched the length of the walk, the gate post held him, as if he had fallen athwart it and been pierced through by it.

He was saved.

He was back in life again.

A curious odor filled his nostrils: open air.

A curious balm warmed his head, the nape of his neck: sunlight.

He was out on the public walk now. Swaying there in the white sunlight, his shadow on the ground swaying in accompaniment. Teetering master, teetering shadow. He marked for his own a tree growing at the roadside, a few short yards off.

He went toward it like an infant learning to walk; a grown infant. Short, stocky steps without bending the knees; kicking each foot up, in a stuttering prance; arms straight out before him to clasp the approaching objective. And then fell against its trunk, and embraced it, and clove there.

And then from there on to another tree.

And then another.

But there were no more trees after that. He was marooned.

Two women passed, market baskets over arms, and sodden there, he raised his hand to stay them, so that they might hear him long enough to give him help.

They swerved deftly to avoid him, tilted noses disdainfully in air, and swept on.

"Disgusting, at such an early hour!" he heard one say to the other.

"Time of day has no meaning for drunkards!" her companion replied sanctimoniously.

He fell down on one knee, but then got up again, circling about in one place like some sort of a broken-winged bird.

A man going by slowed momentarily, cast him a curious look, and Durand trapped his attention on that one look, took a tottering step toward him, again his hand raised in appeal.

"Will you help me, sir? I'm not well."

The man's slackening became a dead halt. "What is it, friend? What ails you ?"

"Is there a doctor somewhere near here? I need to see one."

"There's one two blocks down that way, that I know of. I came past there just now myself."

"Will you lend me an arm just down that far? I don't think I can manage it alone--" The man split at times into two double outlines before his eyes, and then he would cohere again into just one.

The man consulted his pocket watch dubiously. "I'm late already," he grimaced. "But I can't refuse you on such a request." He turned toward him decisively. "Put your weight against me. I'll see that you get there."

They trudged painfully along together, Durand leaning angularly against his escort.

Once, Durand peered up overhead momentarily, at what everyone else saw every day.

"How wonderful the world is!" he sighed. "The sun on everything--and yet still enough left to spare."

The man looked at him strangely, but made no remark.

Presently he stopped, and they were there.

Out of all the houses in that town, or perhaps, out of all the doctors' houses in that town, it and it alone was not entered at ground level but had its entrance up at second-floor height. A flight of steps, a stoop, ran up to this. This was a new style in dwellings, mushrooming up in all the larger cities in whole blocks at a time, all of chocolate colored stone, and with their slighted first floors no longer called that, but known as "American basements."

Otherwise he could have been safely inside within a matter of moments after arriving before it.

But the good Samaritan, having brought him this far, at the cost of some ten minutes of his own time, drew a deep breath of private anxiety, took out his watch and scanned it once more, this time with every sign of furrowed apprehension. "I'd like to take you all the way up these," he confessed, "but I'm a quarter of an hour behind in an appointment I'm to keep, as it is. I don't suppose you can manage them by yourself-- Wait, I'll run up and sound the bell a moment. Then whoever comes out can help you up the rest of the way--"

He scrambled up, dented the pushbutton, and was down again in an instant.

"Will you be all right," he said, "if I leave you now?"

"Thank you," Durand breathed heavily, clinging to the ornamental plinth at bottom of the steps. "Thank you. I'm just resting."

The man set off at a lumbering run down the street, back along the way they had just come, showing his lack of time to have been no idle excuse.

Durand, alone and helpless again, turned and looked upward toward the door. No one had yet come to open it. His eye traveled sideward to the nearest window, and in the lower corner of that was placed a placard both of them had neglected to read in its entirety.

Richard Fraser, M.D.

Consulting Hours: 11 to 1, Mornings--

The half-hour struck from some church belfry in the vicinity. The half-hour before eleven. Half-past ten.

Suddenly two white hands, two soft hands, cupped themselves gently, persuasively, to the slopes of his wasted shoulders, one on each side, from behind, and in a moment more she had insinuated herself around to the front of him, blocking him off from the house, blocking the house off from him.

"Lou! Lou, darling! What is it? What brings you here like this? What are you thinking of--I found the door standing open just now. I found you gone from your bed. I've been running through the streets--I saw you standing here, fortunately, from the block below--Lou, how could you do such a thing to me; how could you frighten me like this--?"

A door opened belatedly, somewhere near at hand, but her face was in the way, her face close to his blotted out the whole world.

"Yes ?" a woman's voice said. "Did you wish something ?"

She turned her head scarcely at all, the merest inch, to answer: "No, nothing. It was a mistake."

The door closed sharply, and life closed with it.

"Up," he breathed. "Up there. Someone--who can help me."

"Here," she answered softly. "Here, before you--the only one who can help you."

He moved weakly to one side to gain clearance, for an ascent he could never have made anyway.

She moved as he did, she stood before him yet.

He moved back again, waveringly.

She moved back again too, she stood before him always.

The waltz resumed, the slow and terrible waltz of death, there on those steps.

"Up," he pleaded. "Let me go up. The door. Have mercy."

Her voice was all compassion, she wept with honey. "Come back with me. My love. My poor dear. My husband." Her eyes too. Her hands, staying him so gently, so gently, he scarcely knew it.

"Be content," he wept weakly. "You've done enough. Give me this one last chance-- Don't take it from me--"

"Do you think I would hurt you? Do you trust a stranger more than you would me? Don't you believe I love you, at all? Do you really doubt it that much ?"

He shook his head bewilderedly. When the body's strength is spent, the mind's discernment dulls with it. Black is white and white is black, and the last voice that spoke is the true one.

"You do love me? You do, Bonny? In spite of all?"

"Can you ask that?" Her lips found his, there in broad daylight, in open street. Never was there a tenderer kiss, breathing such abnegation. Light as the wings of moths. "Ask your heart, now," she whispered. "Ask your heart."

"I've thought such terrible things. Bad dreams they must have been. But they seemed so real at the time. I thought you wanted me out of your way."

"You thought I was the cause of--your being ill like this?" Gambler to the end. She drew a step aside, the step that he had wanted her to take before. "My arms are here. The door is there above you. Now go to whichever one of us you want the most."

He took a swaying step toward her, where she now stood. His head fell upon her breast in ineffable surrender. "I am so tired, Bonny. Take me home with you."

Her breath stirred his hair. "Bonny will take you home."

She led him down the step, the one step toward salvation that was all he had been able to achieve.

Here and there, about them, the walks, the near one and the far, were dotted with a handful of curious passersby, halted in their tracks to watch the touching little scene, without knowing what it was about.

As he and she turned their way, these, their interest palling, set about resuming their various courses. But she called to one man, the nearest among them, before he could make good his departure.

"Sir! Would you try and find us a carriage? My husband is ill, I must get him home as soon as I can."

She would have moved a heart of stone. He tipped his hat, he hastened off on his quest. In a moment or two a carriage had come spanking around the lower turn, her envoy riding upright on the outside step.

It drew up and he helped her, supporting Durand on the one side while she, strong for all her diminutive height, sustained him bravely on the other. Between them they led him gently to the carriage, saw him comfortably to rest upon its seat; the stranger having to step up and into it backward, to do this, and then descend again from its opposite side after he had relinquished his hold on him.

She, settling down beside Durand, reached out and placed her own hand briefly atop the back of her anonymous helper's in accolade of tremulous gratitude. "Thank you, sir. Thank you. I do not know what I should have done without you."

"No one could do less, madam." He looked at her compassionately. "And may God be with the two of you."

"I pray He will," she answered devoutly as the carriage rolled off.

Behind it, on those same disputed steps, as it receded, a man now stood astraddle, a black bag in his hand, gazing after it with cursory interest, no more. He shrugged in incomprehension and completed his ascent, readying his key to put it to the door.

In the carriage on their brief run homeward no one could have been more solicitous.

"Lean down. Rest your head upon my lap, love. That will ease the jarring of the springs."

And in a moment, or so it seemed, they were back again at their own door; his ldng Calvary was undone, gone for nothing. He felt no pang; so complete, so narcoticizing, was the illusion of her love.

The driver, now, was the one to help her getting him down. And then she left him for a moment in his charge at their gate. "Stay here a moment, dear; hold to the post, until I find money to pay him. I came out without my purse, I was in such a fright over you." She ran in alone, the doorway stood empty for a brief while--(and he missed her, for that moment, he missed her)--then she came back again, still at full run, paid off the driver, took Durand into her sole charge.

Up onto the porch floor, a last receding flicker of the white sunlight draining off their backs, and in. A sweep of her arm, and the door was closed again behind him. Forever? For the last time?

Down the long dim hall, past the antlered hatrack, to the foot of the stairs. Every inch had once cost a drop of blood.

But love enfolded him, held him in its arms, and he didn't care. Or perhaps it was death already; and at onset of death you don't care either sometimes.

Then up the stairs a dragging step at a time. Her strength was superb, her will to help him indomitable.

At the landing, as the final turn began, he panted: "Stop here a moment."

"What is it?"

"Let me look back a moment at our sitting room, before we go up higher. I may never see it again. I want to say goodbye to it." He pointed with a wavering hand, out over the slanted rail. "See, there's the table that we sat by, so many evenings, before-this came upon me. See, there's the lamp, the very same lamp, that I always knew--when I was young and not yet married--would shine upon my wife's pretty face, just across from me. And it's shone on yours, Bonny. I thank it for that. Must it never shine on you for me again, Bonny?" His fingertips traced its outline, there against the empty distance that separated it from him. "The lamps of home, the lamps of love, are going out. For me they'll never shine again. Goodbye-"

"Come," she said faintly.

Back into the room again; the bier receiving back its dedicated dead.

She helped him to the bed, and eased him back upon it. Then drew up his feet after him. Took off his shoes, his coat, but nothing else. Then brought the covers slowly up and over him, sideward, like a winding sheet.

"Are you comfortable, Lou? Is your bed smooth enough?" She put hand to his brow. "This foolish foray of yours has cost you all your strength."

His eyes were fixed on her with a strange, melting softness. Like the eyes of a wounded dog, begging its release.

She turned hers away, then irresistibly they were drawn back again. "Why are you looking at me like that, my dear? What are you trying to say ?"

He motioned to her with one finger to bend closer.

She inclined her head a little the better to hear what he had to say.

He reached up falteringly and stroked the fringe, the silken blonde bangs that curved before her cool smooth forehead.

Then he struggled higher, onto an elbow, as if cast upward by the ebb tide that was leaving him behind so rapidly.

"I love you, Bonny," he whispered fiercely. "No other one, no other love. From first to last, from start to finish. And beyond. Beyond, Bonny; do you hear me? Beyond. It will not end. I will, but it will not."

Her face came nearer still, slowly, uncertainly; like that of one dipping toward a new experience, feeling her way. Something had happened to it, was happening to it; he had never seen it so soft before. It was as if he were seeing another face, never born, peering shyly through the mask that had stifled it all these years; the face that should have been hers, that might have been--but that never had. The face of the soul, before the blasts of the world had altered it beyond recognition.

It came close to his, falteringly, through strange new latitudes of emotion, never traveled before.

There were tears in her eyes. It was no illusion; he saw them.

"Will a little love do, Lou ?"

"Any amount."

"Then there was a moment in which I loved you. And this is it."

And the kiss, unforced, unsolicited, had all the bitter sweetness, the unattainable yearning, of a love that might have been. And he knew, his heart knew, it was the first she had ever really given him.

"That was enough," he smiled, content. "That was all I've ever wanted."

Claiming her hand, holding it in his, he fell into an uneasy sleep, a fever oblivion, for a while.

When he awoke, the dregs of daylight were settling in the west, like a fine white ash; the day was past. Her hand was still in his, and she was sitting there, her face toward him. She seemed not to have moved in all those hours, to have endured it, this thing new to her--pain for someone else's sake--without demur; to have kept her vigil with no company other than the sight of his deathbound face--and whatever thoughts that had brought her.

He released her hand. "Bonny," he sighed, agonized. "Get me another of those tonics, now. I am ready for it. It's better--that you do, I think--"

Involuntarily, she drew her head back sharply for a moment. Held her gaze to his. Then at last inclined it again to where it had been before.

"Why do you ask for it now? I haven't offered it."

"I'm in pain," he said simply. "I can't endure much more of it." And turned a little this way, then turned a little that. "If not in kindness, then in charity--"

"Later," she said evasively. "Don't talk that way, don't say such things."

Sweat started out on his face. His breath hissed through his nostrils. "When I did not want them, you urged them on me-- Now that I plead with you, you deny me--" He heaved his body upward, then allowed it to fall back again. "Now, Bonny, now; I can't bear any more. This is as good a time as any. Why wait for the night to be further advanced? Oh, spare me the night, Bonny, spare me the night It is so long--so dark--so lonely--"

She stood slowly, absently rubbing her frozen hand. Then with even greater slowness moved toward the door. She opened it, then stopped there to look back at him. Then went out.

He heard her going down the stairs. And twice he heard her stop, as though impulse had flagged; and then go on again, as she fanned it back to life once more.

She was gone about ten minutes in all. Ten minutes of hell, while flames licked at him all over.

Then presently the door opened and she had returned. She was carrying it in her hand. She came to him and set it down upon the stand, a little to the side of him, beyond easy reach.

"Don't-- Not yet--" she said in a stifled voice, when he tried to reach for it. "Let it wait a while. A little later will do."

She lit the lamp, and then went over by the fireplace to fling the match away. Then she remained there by it, looking down into it. He knew she was not looking at anything there was there before her to see; she was in a revery that saw nothing.

His revery, on its part, saw everything. Everything again. Again he waltzed with her at Antoine's on their wedding night--"A waltz in sunlight, love; in azure, white and gold." Again her playful query sounded through their marriage door-- "Who knocks" "Your husband." Again she stood revealed against the lighted midnight entryway--"Come into your wife's bedroom, Louis." Again they walked the seafront promenade at Biloxi, arm in arm, and the breeze swept off his hat, and she laughed to see him chase it, herself a spinning cyclorama of windswept skirts. Again he raised his arms above her sleeping form to let hundred dollar bills flutter down upon it. Again--

Again, again, again--for the last time.

The truly cruel part of death is not the end of the body; it is the expiration of all memories.

A bright light, like a hot, flickering, yellow star, burned through the ghostly mesh of his death dreams. He looked over and she was standing sideward to the fireplace, holding a burning brand outthrust toward it in her hand. Yet not a stick or twig; it was a scroll of tightly furled paper. And as the flame slowly slanted upward toward her hand, she deftly reversed it, taking it now by the charred end that had already been consumed and allowing the other to burn.

Then threw it down at last, and thrusting out her foot, trod upon its remnants here and there and the next place with little pats of finality.

"What are you doing, Bonny?" he whispered feebly.

She did not turn her head, as if it were of no consequence to her whether or not he had seen. "Burning a paper."

"What paper ?"

Her voice had no tone. "A policy of insurance--upon your life-- payable for twenty thousand dollars."

"It was not worth the trouble. It lacked force, I told you that."

"It was in force again just now. I pledged my ring and made up the payments."

Suddenly he saw her cover her face with the flats of her hands as if, even after having burned it, she still could not bear the remembered aftersight of it.

He sighed, but without much emotion. "Poor Bonny. Did you want the money that badly? I would have--" He didn't finish it.

He lay there for a moment or two after that, inert.

"I'd better drink this now," he said softly, at last.

He strained until his arm could reach the glass. He clasped it, took it up.

64

Suddenly she had turned, thrown herself toward him. He hadn't known the human form could move so quickly. But she was so deft, she was so small. Her hand flashed out, a white missile before his face. The tumbler was gone from his grasp. Glass riddled on the floor somewhere offside beyond his ken.

Her face seemed to melt into shapeless weeping lines, like a face seen through rain running down a pane. She caught him to her convulsively, crushing his face against her soft breast. He hadn't known her embrace could hold that much strength. She'd never loved him enough to exert it to the full before.

"Oh, merciful God," she cried out wildly. "Look down and forgive me! Stop this terrible thing, turn it back, undo it! Lou, my Lou! Only now I see it I Oh, my eyes are open, open now at last! What have I done?"

She dropped to her knees before him, as she had that night in Biloxi when they first came together again. But how different now; how false, how studied her pleas, her posture then, how inconsolable her passion of remorse now, a veritable paroxysm of penitence, that nothing, no word of his, could assuage.

Her sobbing had the wild, panting turbulence of a child's, strangling her words, rendering her almost incoherent. Perhaps this was a child crying now, a newborn self in her, a little girl held mute for twenty years, only now belatedly finding voice.

"I must have been mad-- Out of my mind-- How could I have listened to such a scheme? But when I was with him, I saw only him, never you-- He brought out that old bad self in me-- He made wrong things seem right, or just something to snicker at--"

Her fingers, pleading, traced the outlines of his face; trembling, felt of his lips, of his lidded eyes, as if seeking to restore them to what they had been. Nothing, no voracious kisses seeking him out everywhere, no splurge of teardrops falling all over him, could bring him back.

"I've killed you! I've killed you!"

And rebel to the end, fell prone and beat upon the floor with her fist, in helpless rebellion at the trickery fate had practised on her.

Then suddenly her weeping stopped. As suddenly as though a stroke of fear had been laid across her bowed head. Her pummelling hand stilled.

Her head came up. She was bated, she was watchful, she was crafty. Of what he could not tell. She turned and looked behind her at the window, in dreadful secretive apprehension.

"Nobody shall take you from me," she said through clenched teeth. "I'll not give you up. Not for anyone. It's not too late, it's not! I'm going to get you out of here, where you'll be safe- Hurry, get your things. We'll go together. I have the strength for the two of us. You're going to live. Do you hear me, Lou? You're going to live--yet."

She sidled up beside the window, creeping along the wall until she had gained an outer edge of it; then peered narrowly out, using the slit between curtain edge and wall. He saw her nod slightly to herself, as if in confirmation of something she had expected to see.

"What is it?" he whispered. "Who's out there?"

She didn't answer. Suddenly she drew her head back sharply, as if fearful she had been detected just then from the outside.

"Shall I put out the lamp?" he asked.

"No!" She motioned to him horrified. "For God's sake, no! I was to have done that. It will be taken for a signal that--it's over. Our only chance is to go now, and leave it still on, as if--as if we were here yet."

She came running back to him, yet not forgetting even as she did so to throw still another backward glance of dread at the window; she settled down beside him with a billowing-out of her dress, took hold of his untended foot, raised it, while he still strove valiantly with the first.

"Quickly, your other shoe! There, that's all-- No time for more."

She helped him quit his sitting position on the edge of the bed, held him upright on his feet beside her, like some sort of an inanimate mannikin or rigid toy soldier that would fall over if her hands quitted him for just an instant and left him to himself.

"Lean on me, I'll help you. There ! There! Move your feet, that's it! Oh, Lou, try this one time more. just this one time more. You did it before. This time we're together, we're going together. This time it's our love itself that's running away--for its very life."

He smiled at her, as the floor slowly crept by beneath their tottering feet, inch by painful inch.

"Our love," he whispered bravely. "Our love, running away. Where are we going ?"

"Any train, anywhere. Only let us get out of this house-"

She struggled heroically with him, as though she were the spirit of life itself, contesting with the spirit of death that sought to possess him. Now holding him back when he inclined too far forward, now drawing him on when he swayed too far backward. Out the room door and along the upper hall. But on the stairs once she nearly lost him. For a moment there was a terrible equipoise, while he hung forward, threatening to topple downward, all the way downward, head first, and she strained her small body backward to the last ounce of its strength, striving to regain the balance that had been incautiously lost.

Not a whimper came from her in that frightful moment, and surely had he gone downward to his own destruction, she would have clung to him to the end, gone down with him to her own, rather than release him. But a strength came into her arms that had never been in them before, and slowly her squeezing pull, her embrace of desperation, righted him, drew him back against her, and equilibrium was regained.

And then, as they rested half-recumbent against the rail a moment, she with her back to it, he with his head pillowed on her breast, she found time to stroke his hair back soothingly from his brow and whisper: "Courage, love. I will not let you fall. Is it very hard for you ?"

"No," he murmured wanly, rolling his eyes upward toward her downturned face above him, "because you are with me."

Downward once more then, more cautiously this time, step by mincing step, like a pair of ballet dancers locked in one another's arms, pointed toe following pointed toe in a horrid, groping, blinded sort of pas de deux.

As they neared the bottom, were within one last step of it, she suddenly stopped, frozen. And in the silence, over the rise and fall of their two breaths, they both heard it.

There was a low, urgent tapping going on against the front door. Very stealthy it was, very secretive. Meant only to be caught by a single pair of ears, no other. A pair forewarned to expect it, to listen for it. Two fingers at the most, perhaps only one, kept striking at the woodwork; scratching at it, scraping at it, it might almost have been said, so softened was their impact.

A peculiar whistle sounded with it. Also modulated very low, very guardedly. Little more than a stirring of the breath against a wavering upper lip. Plaintive, melancholy, like the sound, of a baby owl. Or a lost wisp of night wind trying to find its way in.

It was intermittent. It waited. Then sounded again. Waited. Sounded again.

"Sh, don't make any noise!" He could feel her arms tighten protectively about him. As if instinctively seeking to safeguard him against something. Something that she understood, knew the meaning of, he didn't. "The back way," she breathed. "We'll have to go out by there- Hold your breath, love. For the love of heaven, don't make a sound or--we'll both be dead in here where we stand."

Cautiously, straining against one another, as much now to insure their mutual silence as before now it had been to maintain his uprightness, they quitted the stairs, crept rearward on the lower floor, into the dining room. She halted him there for a preciously spared moment, to reach for a decanter of stimulant, give it a twisting shake, extract the glass stopper and moisten his lips with it, while she still continued to hold him within the curve of her other arm.

"I'm afraid to give you too much," she mourned. "You are so spent."

"My love's beside me," he promised, as if speaking to himself. "I won't fail."

They moved on into the unlighted kitchen beyond, swimming submerged in the blue tide of night, but with the curtained glass square of its door, the back way out, peering at them, distinguishable in the dimness.

He heard the bolt scrape softly back beneath her diligently groping fingers. Then the door moved inward, and the coolness of escape was grateful in their faces.

The last sound behind them, traveling through the whole length of the house from its front, was that low tapping, recommencing again after a grudging wait. A little more hurried now than before, a little more insistent. And with it the whistle, with its secretive message, that seemed to say: "Open to me. Open. You know who I am. You know me. Why do you delay?" A little sharper now, a little more importunate, as its patience shortened.

He did not ask her who it was. There were so many things in life it was too late now to ask, too late now to know. There was only one thing he wanted to know, he needed to know, and that at long last had been told him: she loved him.

They floundered out into the backyard of their house, and out through the gate that led into it, from the lane that ran behind the backs of all these houses; down that to its mouth, and from there onto the sideward street. Then along that, and around the turn, and into the street that ran behind the one their house had faced upon.

"The station," she kept saying. "The station-- Oh, try, Lou. It's just a few short streets ahead. We'll be safe, if we can only reach it. There's always someone there, day or night-- There are lights there, no one can hurt us there. A train-- Any train, to anywhere-"

Any train, his heart kept saying in time to its desperate pounding, to anywhere.

On and on and on, two lurching figures, breaths sobbing in their throats; reeling drunken, yes, drunken with the will to live and love, in peace. No eye to see them, no hand to help them.

It was in sight already, across the open square ahead, the station square, the hub of the town,--or so she told him, he could no longer see that far before him--when suddenly the combination of their overtaxed strengths gave out, her arms, her will, could do no more, and he fell flat there in the dust beside her.

She tried desperately to bring him up again, but she'd weakened so that his inertness could only bring her down half recumbeht beside him, instead, as if he were pulling at her, not she at him.

"Don't waste time," he sighed. "I can't-- Not a step further."

She struggled upright again, drove fingers distractedly through her hair, looked, this way, that.

"I've got to get you in out of the open! Oh, my love, my love, we may be caught yet if we stay here too long--"

Then bending to his face, to give him courage with a kiss, ran on and left him there where he was. She disappeared into a building fronting on the square, with a lighted gas bowl over its doorway and the legend: "Furnished Rooms for Travelers."

In a moment she returned to view again, beckoning to someone within to hasten out after her. She came running back toward him, without waiting, holding her skirts with both hands at once, bunched forward and aloft to give her feet the freedom they needed. Behind her appeared a shirtsleeved man, struggling into his coat as he emerged. He set out after her.

"Here," she cried. "Over this way. Here he is."

He joined her beside the loglike figure on the ground.

"Help me get him to one of your rooms."

The man, a beefy stalwart, lifted him bodily in both arms, turned with him to face toward the lodging house. She ran around him from one side to the next, trying to be of help, trying to take hold of Durand's feet.

"No, I can manage," the man said. "You go first and hold the door."

The black sky over the station square, pocked with stars, eddied about this way and that just over Durand's upturned eyes. He had a feeling of being very close to it. Then it changed to gaslightpallor on a plaster ceiling. Then this slanted off upward, gradually dimming, and he was being borne up stairs. He could hear the quick tap of her deft feet, pressing close behind them, in the spaces between his carrier's slower plod. And once he felt his dangling hand caught up swiftly for a moment by two small ones, and the fervent print of a pair of velvety lips placed on it.

"I'm sorry it's so high up," the man said, "but that's all I have."

"No matter," she answered. "Anything. Anything."

They passed through a doorway, the ceiling dark at first, then gradually brightening to tarnished silver following the soft, spongy fluff of an ignited gas flow. Their shadows swam about on it, then blended, faded.

"Shall I put him on the bed, madam?"

"No," Durand said weakly. "No more beds. Beds mean dying. Beds mean death." His eyes sought hers, as the man lowered him to a chair, and he smiled through them. "And I'm not going to die, am I, Bonny ?" he whispered resolutely.

"Never!" she answered huskily. "I'll not let you!" She clenched her tiny fists, and set her jaw, and he could see sparks of defiance in her eyes, as if they were flint stones.

"Shall I get you a doctor, madam ?" the man asked.

"Nothing more this minute. Leave us alone together. I'll let you know later. Here, take this for now." She thrust some money at him through the door. "I'll sign the registry book later."

She locked it, came running back to Durand. She dropped before him in an imploring attitude.

"Louis, Louis, did I once want money, did I once want fine clothes and jewels? I'd give them all at this minute to have you stand strong and upright on your legs before me. I'd give my very looks themselves--" she clawed at her own face, dragging its supple cheeks forward as if seeking to transfer it toward him, "--and what more have I to give ?"

"Make your plea to God, dear, not to me," he said faintly, gently. "I want you as you are. I wouldn't change you even for life itself. I don't want a good woman, a noble woman. I want my vain, my selfish Bonny-- It's you I love, the badness and the good alike, and not the qualities they tell us a woman should have. Be brave in this: don't change, ever. For I love you as I know you, and if God can love, then He can understand."

The tears were streaming in reckless profusion from her eyes, she who had never wept in all her life; the tears of a lifetime, stored up until now, and now splurging wildly forth all in one burst of regret.

His fingers reached tremulously to trace their course. "Don't weep any more. You've wept so much these past few minutes. I wanted to give you happiness, not tears."

She caught her breath and struggled with it, restraining it, quelling it. "I'm so new at love, Louis. It's only a half-day now. Only a half-day out of twenty-three years. Louis," she asked like a child in wonderment, "is this what it's like? Does it always hurt so?"

He remembered back along their story, spent now. "It hurts. But it's worth it. It's love."

A strange snorting sound came from the outside, somewhere near by, through the closed window, as if a great bull-like beast, hampered with clanking chains, were muzzling the ground.

"What was that ?" he asked vaguely, raising his head a little.

"It's a train, out there somewhere in the dark. A train, coming into the station, or shuttling about in the yards--"

His arms stiffened on the chair rests, thrusting him higher.

"Bonny, it's for us, it's ours. Any train, to anywhere-- Help me. Help me get out of here. I can do it, I can reach it--"

She had lived by violence all her life; by sudden change, and swift decision. She rose to it now on the instant, she was so used to it. She was ready at a word. Instantly her spirit flared up, kindled by his.

"Anywhere. Even New York. You'll stand by me there if they--"

She thrust her arm around behind him, helped him rise from the chair. Again the endless flight was about to recommence. Tightarmed together, they took a step forward, toward the door. A single one--

He fell. And this time there was a finality to it that could not be mistaken. It was the fall to earth of the dead. He lay there flat, unresisting, supine, waiting for it. He lay face up, looking at her with despairing eyes.

Her face swiftly dipped to his.

"No time," he whispered through immobile lips. "Don't speak. Put your lips to mine. Tell me goodbye with that."

Kiss of farewell. Their very souls seemed to flow together. To try to blend forever into one. Then, despairing, failed and were separated, and one slipped down into darkness and one remained in the light.

She drew her lips from his, for sheer necessity of breathing. There was a smile of ineffable contentment left on his, there where her lips had been.

"And that was my reward," he sighed.

His eyes closed, and there was death.

A shudder ran through her, as though the throes of dying were in her herself. She shook him, trying to bring back the motion that had only just left him, but left him forever. She pressed him to her, in desperate embrace that he was no longer within, only some dead thing he had left behind. She pleaded with him, called to him. She even tried to make a bargain with death itself, win a delay.

"No, wait! Oh, just one minute more! One minute give me, and then I'll let him go! Oh, God! Oh, Someone! Anyone at all! Just one more minute! I have something I want to tell him!"

No desolation equal to that of the pagan, suddenly bereft. For to the pagan, there is no hereafter.

She flung herself downward over him, and her hair, coming unbound, flowed over him, covering his face. The golden hair that he had loved so, made a shroud for him.

Her lips sought his ear, and she tried to whisper into it, for him alone to hear. "I love you. I love you. Can't you hear me? Where are you? That is what you always wanted. Don't you want it now?"

In the background of her grief, distant, dim, unheeded, echoes seemed to rise around her. A muffled pounding on the door, clamoring voices backing it, conjured there now, at just this place, this moment, who knows how? Perhaps by long-pent suspicions of neighbors overflowing at last into denunciation; perhaps that other crime in Mobile long, long ago, overtaking them at last--too late, too late. For she had escaped, just as surely as he had.

"Open, in there! This is a police order! Open this door, do you hear ?"

Their meaning could not impress, their threat could not affright. For she was somebody else's prisoner now. She had escaped them.

Moaning anguished into a heedless ear: "Oh, Louis, Louis! I have loved you too late. Too late I have loved you."

The knocking and the clamor and the grief faded out, and there was nothing left.

"And this is my punishment."

The soundless music stops. The dancing figures wilt and drop.

The Waltz is done.

THE END