VII

Farewell Party

It was almost three quarters of an hour later when Sheridan brought the small, somewhat decrepit roadster to a careful halt half a block from the little Georgian house that for the past twenty-four hours he had called home, and took the flight of black-leaded steps that led up to the grass-green front door three at a time, though no one even a few feet away would have heard a footfall. Twenty past twelve, his hastily consulted watch told him—-those unfruitful calls from the corner cigar store had certainly consumed an ungodly amount of time.…

The shades were all drawn, and as far as one could see, the house was quite dark. Still with those long, heavy draperies, it was hard to tell.…

In the Yale lock of the green door, the key turned as noiselessly and precisely as though it had been oiled—which was not entirely extraordinary, as that was exactly the process that it had undergone some half a dozen hours previously.

Inside the diminutive hallway the silver lantern was shining reassuringly, and though, again, it was difficult to be certain, Sheridan thought that there was a faint glimmer of light under the dark panelled doors that led to Mallory’s study. For a moment he halted irresolutely, staring in its direction, only to turn away, with a quick shake of his shoulders, like someone emerging suddenly from a bitterly cold plunge. Not now—later, perhaps; after he had attended to that one really vital bit of business that would peg down the whole infernal affair—but not now. If there was one thing that he was clear about in a world of loathsome indecisions, it was that he did not want to see Dion Mallory at the present moment.

Even his noiseless feet on the twisting stairway, moving at last towards that final and urgent bit of work, were curiously reluctant. Strive as he would, he could not forget how gay a clatter Mallory’s had made as he raced up them only that morning, and the warm, brilliant voice running ahead of them to greet his guest. He had been singing, too—what was it that he had been singing?

“Our feelings we with difficulty smother

When constabulary duty’s to be done …

Oh, take one consideration with another,

A policeman’s lot is not …”

He paused on the top step almost as abruptly as though a hand had reached out and checked him, staring straight ahead of him into the semi-obscurity of the second floor. Something was wrong—a sixth sense more vigilant and alert than either sight or hearing called the warning loudly—something was definitely and distinctly wrong. His own senses moved swiftly forward to the rescue.

The door at the left that led to his bedroom was closed, just as he had left it; so, too, was the one at the right, that led to his sitting room. But the center one—the one that led to the hall closet that held Jerry Hardy’s chemicals and artist’s stuff—the third door was standing an inch or so ajar, and undoubtedly and inexplicably there was a faint light shining through the crack.

Sheridan, moving towards it on feet so entirely noiseless that they might have been shod in velvet, circled the knob with his fingers and jerked the door sharply towards him—and stood staring into the dimly lit little cavern before him with an expression of marked displeasure. Empty. That is, if you could describe any place as empty that was so’ thoroughly cluttered as to floor and crowded as to shelf as the closet of the late Jerry Hardy. True, someone had undoubtedly been in it during the evening. The dim bulb far up in the ceiling was burning as brightly as its limited capacity permitted, but that was the only sign that the intruder had left behind him.… Hardy must certainly have taken his experiments seriously—there was enough stuff here to equip a chemical laboratory and leave enough over to start a flourishing pharmacy. Shelf after shelf, lined with bottles and cans and jars, rose to the ceiling in unbroken rows. No, there was a break, in the third one to the right—that must be the empty space that Mallory had spoken of—the space that had once held poor Hardy’s hyoscine bottles, standing between a bottle of silver nitrate and a can of—He paused, his eyes narrowing in a sudden shock of surprise. There was the bottle of nitrate all right, but there wasn’t a can the whole length of the shelf—much less a can of cyanide of potassium. If it had ever been there, it had disappeared as completely and inexplicably as the hyoscine bottles.… Well, maybe Mallory’s visual memory wasn’t as extraordinary as he thought it was.… He reached up his hand slowly and pulled the cord that plunged the closet once more into its accustomed darkness. There was a little wind blowing from somewhere. It was spring, and late spring at that, but suddenly Sheridan felt cold.

In his own room he turned on the switch with a sudden uprush of gratitude for the warm flood of light. Light, and a great deal of it, had its decided merits.… The long desk with the shining microscope and its accessories was not a hand’s breadth from him; he took a step forward resolutely and pulled open the center drawer, his face pale for all its darkness.… Now was as good a time as any—or as bad. The red glass and the gray envelope with its red stamp neatly fixed in the corner were exactly where he had left them; he lifted them out with set teeth and drew the student lamp closer.

After a minute he lifted his head.… So that was it.… Even with his eyes closed, he could still see them clearly. Nine little slanting words—there had been nine words on that other stamp that he had read by a Christmas candle. Nine were enough, apparently, to send—Somewhere below a door closed, quietly and decisively, and as though it were a trumpet call, Sheridan was on his feet and at the head of the stairs in three long strides.

Tess was standing quite still at the foot of the stairs under the little hanging lantern, one hand on the newel post, her eyes on the lowest step. Sheridan saw once more, with the strange contraction of the heart that came to him at even the sound of her lightest footfall, her most distant whisper, that the ruby ring was back on her hand, and that the shadows still lay deep beneath the long, dark lashes when she dropped them, as she did now. And once more the lovely, reckless mouth was tinted to match the ruby, once more a white cloud of silvery gauze floated and clung about the tall young length, once more the bent head was smooth and lustrous as honey-colored satin. She was trailing a long cloak made of some supple heavy stuff, lustrous and silvery, from her left hand, careless of its subdued splendor, and one silver-sandaled foot was already on the first step. Staring down at her, the young man from Vienna thanked his gods—even while he thought bitterly that of late he had had singularly little to thank them for—that murder and treachery and cruelty and horror had still left her snow and gold as unflawed as on that first night that he had met her. How long ago—three thousand years? Three brief spans of hours? … He drew a deep breath, placed his own hand on the railing, and said quietly:

“I heard a door close down there and thought it was Mallory.… Is there, perhaps, something that I can do for you, Tess?”

The incredible eyelashes lifted, and the deep young voice said slowly:

“No, it wasn’t Dion. He’s in there. You don’t have to disturb him now, do you? He’s been pretty badly upset. I don’t think that there’s anything that you can do for me. Still—may I come up?”

“Surely. You do not prefer that I come down to you?”

“No, I’d rather come up, thanks. You have Jerry’s sitting room, haven’t you? Nobody will disturb us there—and I have rather a lot to tell you.”

He stood watching the fan of foaming silver following in her wake around the gracious curves of the stair, as she came slowly towards him closer and closer, her head once more bent, and the white shoulders a little bent, too, as though by some invisible burden. It was not until she was directly before him that she pulled together all her slim length from brow to heel and stood there smiling at him faintly, though she did not stretch out her hand.

“It’s this door to the right, isn’t it? Shan’t we go in and sit down? I’m just beginning to realize that I’m a little tired.”

“By all means. Wait one moment only until I find the lights.… There!”

The small green-and-white room was as fresh and fragrant and ordered as when he had left it—fresher, even, because the inimitable Timothy had emptied the ashtrays and placed a great bowl of peonies, waxen white, sumptuously ruffled and fragrant as May itself, in the bay window where a breeze stirred the organdy curtains, and on the table between the two great barrel chairs that flanked the unlit fire stood the nut-brown bottle of ancient sherry, and a small grayish crock marked “Finest Old Potted Stilton,” and a plate of thin, salted biscuits. There were two glasses waiting, too, sparkling and immaculate, and a slim Waterford goblet filled with the white bells and long gray-green leaves of lilies of the valley.

Tess, with a slight, expressive gesture towards the table, asked hesitantly:

“Oh—two of them? Perhaps I’m in the way, then. Were you expecting someone?”

“I did not even know that they were here. It must have been Timothy’s idea; Mallory and I had a drink together before we went out, and perhaps he thought that we might share a nightcap before we turned in. The sherry is really extraordinarily good—may I not give you some? If Mallory comes up later we can quite easily get another glass. You say that he was badly upset? He has heard, then, of Hardy’s death?”

His hand was already stretched halfway to the bottle before he felt her fingers on his arm.

“Yes—I told him.… K—wait a minute, will you? If I were you, I wouldn’t touch those things—not any of them. Leave them just the way they were when Timothy brought them in.”

Her voice was as soft and uninflected as though she were telling a servant to carry out the tea things, but he could feel the long, white fingers tighten about his arm, and through the cloth of the coat sleeve it struck him that they were cold—that they were colder than ice.… He checked the little shudder that he could feel closing in about his heart with such sharp and savage contempt that he could feel even his lips whitening under its lash. If he was going to spend the next few minutes letting a set of sick nerves play as much havoc with him as though he were a neurotic schoolgirl, he had better call quits now and ring for a nurse and a policeman to take over his duties.

After a moment he said lightly, but with raised brows:

“Oh, but naturally—I will do—or leave undone—whatever is possible to make for your comfort and happiness. That is why I am here, is it not? But by and by perhaps you will gratify a not wholly morbid interest that I take in why we must not touch those things. Is it possible that you are afraid of leaving fingerprints behind?”

She said, more softly and unemphatically still, taking her hand from his arm:

“No. No, that’s not what I’m afraid of. In fact, it’s the very last thing in the world I’m afraid of. Perhaps later on I’ll explain that, too, and then you’ll understand that, no matter how improbable it may sound, it was you that I was thinking of, not myself at all. I think that it would be much better, for your sake, if there wasn’t even a suggestion that you and Dion might have had that nightcap together—that you had seen him at all after the Lindsays’ party. I’m not sure how much I’m going to tell you yet, you see. I’m not sure how much I can tell anyone—ever. But I’m quite sure that I have to sit down for a minute. Can I use this sofa here by the window? Do you mind?”

He saw then for the first time that it was necessary for her to rest her hand on one of the chairs in order to steady herself; a fine tremor was running through her from head to foot—more like the vibration of an overcharged wire than an actual shudder—still, strange and terrifying enough.

Sheridan said swiftly:

“Tess, how could I mind? Let me, I beg you, give you only a small glass of the sherry—it will put new heart in you, poor child—and God knows that before this night is over you are going to need the bravest heart a girl ever had.”

Tess, dropping the silver cloak over the end of the green-glazed sofa, so that it flowed down like a little river hurrying to the green sea of the carpet, lifted her hand once more in sharp warning.

“K, please! I’ve asked you already—I beg you again—not to touch that tray. I’m not being hysterical; just now you’ll have to take my word that there’s an essential reason for not laying a finger on it. Later I’ll explain why—if I can. I don’t need the sherry. I’m not ever—” She sat down, slowly and uncertainly, as though for the first time she were learning what some day it would feel like to be old and tired—and for a second her lips shook uncontrollably. After a long moment she leaned her bright head back against the cushion and said steadily, looking at him with eyes that did not see him at all, “I’m not ever going to touch anything to drink again. Not as long as I live. Not ever.”

He thought of Fay, and the empty glass on the hearthrug, and the little brown bottle standing by that large brown one in the night nursery—and for a moment he thought, too, that he understood why she was never again going to touch even a drop to drink—even a little shining glass of old brown sherry to bring warmth to a heart chilled with strange terrors. But as he stood staring down at the still face, whiter than snow, at the unseeing eyes, blank as pools of silver rain, something in it made him pause and check back, wondering whether even Fay’s death had given it the look that it bore now—a look more haunting and profound than even she could conceal—deeper than the flesh that she could dominate, than the blood now draining away from it, and the bone that molded it to such serene enchantment—a look of controlled terror and desperation that rose from the very center of her being. She had worn no such look when confronted with the bright horror of Fay’s small crumpled body and ruffled hair.… No. Something had happened since then to bring that look. He did not greatly care to think what it might have been.… After a moment that seemed to him interminable, he asked:

“May I, too, sit down? We have many things to speak of, you and I.”

Tess Stuart whispered, more as though she were echoing than answering him:

“Oh, yes, K—a great many things.”

Sheridan, who had seated himself before she even lifted her voice, leaned forward, struck a match, and inhaled three deep breaths before he spoke again. Then he remarked, casually and pleasantly:

“I tried to reach you tonight at your house by telephone, but it did not answer.”

Tess replied, still from that wide-eyed and unseeing distance:

“From Joan Lindsay’s, you mean? Oh, by that time I’d probably left.”

“Had you, indeed?” He could feel, wondering and contemptuous, the bitterness in a voice that did not seem to belong to him at all. “It was at some time around quarter to twelve. I thought that possibly once more the telephone was off the hook, and the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign swinging from the night-nursery door.”

Tess answered, unmoving and unmoved:

“Children’s tricks. I gave them up a long time ago.… I’d been gone a good half-hour by quarter to twelve.”

“Have you no servants, then, Tess, to answer bells that ring?”

At that she fixed her eyes on him, no longer blind, but startlingly luminous and alert.

“Yes, we have quite a lot of servants. The bell used to ring in their quarters, and there was always someone only too willing to answer it, day or night, unless the circuit was deliberately disconnected—as Fay used to do by leaving her receiver off the hook when she didn’t want to be disturbed.… It wasn’t until today that I arranged with the company to fix it so that I could switch off everything except my own telephone in my room. I did switch it off tonight before I left—that’s why you couldn’t reach me.”

“Your own telephone? But that, Tess, I do not understand.”

She murmured, her eyes on the long cool hands, fast-locked now against any tremors:

“Oh, don’t you see why? I’ve told you that our servants are nothing more than thoroughly corrupted spies—Dad’s paid them to be a cross between watchdogs and stool pigeons as far as we’re concerned—so that now that the newspapers have gotten hold of the story of Fay’s death, the house has simply been the lowest circle of hell for me. I told them to say that I was out, of course—but if any enterprising young reporter called up and suggested that there was fifty dollars in it for a good little butler or a bright little maid who would get them five minutes over the wire in the presence of the surviving Stuart sister, there wasn’t any lie or trick that my loyal servitors wouldn’t resort to. They’d tell me that it was someone from the lawyer’s office, or the doctor’s, or the police, or the—the undertakers—or someone that Dad had cabled about something vitally important—and I simply didn’t dare risk not seeing them—and under the circumstances I didn’t dare to be too insistent about credentials. If they were the real, bona-fide people that they claimed to represent, it would have been rather bad luck—and bad management, too—to antagonize them or stir up their suspicions, shouldn’t you think? So this morning I lined the whole lot of servants up and told them that from now on, as far as telephones went, I’d handle my own calls, and they’d have to get on without any.”

“Yes. You are quite right. I am beginning to find out that you are generally quite right—or did I find that out a long time ago? Now I understand perfectly. You had your switch put in so that you could close the others out and keep matters in your own hands.”

“You see, this way, I can just pull a little black catch from one side to the other, and leave every single one of the demons—oh, what do you call it—incommunicado, isn’t it? I’m going to do it every morning from now on as soon as they finish with the marketing. And all I have to do when mine rings is to say that this is Miss Stuart’s maid speaking, and that Miss Stuart is far too ill to see anyone at present, but if the gentleman will just leave his name and address, she will communicate with him the very first moment that the doctor permits her to see anyone. It’s a very comfortable arrangement, especially as now the entire domestic colony can’t listen in to every last word of my more or less private conversations.”

She unloosed the hard-wrung hands in her lap and bestowed on him a lovely, vague smile, the slim body suddenly relaxed.

Sheridan smiled, too, a trifle mechanically. He had, abruptly and inexplicably, the almost clairvoyant conviction that Tess Stuart was talking to gain time, with all this babble of switches and servants—it was not like her to be so spendthrift with words, and the relaxation struck him—quite as inexplicably—as even more vigilant than the tension that had held her taut as a charged wire. But for what reason was she sparring for the minutes that were slipping away from them now of all times?

“As you say, it must indeed have been a relief to be sure that no one could overhear your conversation, especially under what you refer to as the circumstances. There must have been times when you found it even more dangerous than annoying.”

Tess, her eyes meeting his unflinchingly, said readily:

“Oh, there were! There was you, of course—and no matter how ambiguous we managed to be, there was always that dreadful off chance that someone might have wits enough to put two and two together and make a fairly dangerous four.”

“And Dion’s calls, too—were they not a little dangerous?”

She looked at him strangely for a moment before she said in a small, distant voice:

“Yes—Dion’s calls … I worried about them rather badly, too. Was there something you wanted to ask me about Dion, K?”

“I thought that it was you who were going to ask me things. Or was it that you were only going to tell me them?”

She whispered, lifting both hands to her brow and pushing back the shining weight of hair with the old gesture that nearly broke his heart:

“I don’t know. I don’t know how much I’m going to tell you. That was what I was trying to decide. I thought—I thought that maybe you might be able to help me.”

“Maybe I can. Though not the way that you expected me to, I am afraid.” He knew now why she had been talking all that grave, unimportant nonsense about telephones and servants; he had been quite right. She had been talking to gain time—time in which to think—time in which to draw a long breath and gather those clear wits of hers together, so that she could use them for some purpose still dim and unfocused.… Time in which to plan. Something had happened so swiftly that she had not yet found time to plan.… He struck a match, lit a fresh cigarette, and continued conversationally, “When I could not reach you at your own house, I tried this one. Someone—Abby Stirling, I think—had told me that Mallory had left some time around eleven because of a telephone message that, I gathered, he had received from you. It was well over half an hour before I called both houses, and this one didn’t answer, either.”

“No,” she said in the same small, strange voice, “I suppose it didn’t. That must have been the bell that we heard ringing. Timothy and Susan had gone home, and Dion said not to answer it.”

“I see. Perhaps, after all, Tess, before you tell me anything whatever as to what you and Dion were doing here tonight, I should tell you something; something of the utmost importance. In fairness to all three of us. But, first, will you answer me a question?”

“Any question.”

“Thank you. When you called up Mallory tonight at the Lindsays’, was it to tell him that I suspected him—that he was in danger?”

“I didn’t have to tell him that, K. He knew that you suspected him and that he was in great danger.”

“You had told him?”

“No. He had told me.”

“But these suspicions—when did he begin to have them?”

“From the first time that he talked to you about it—about Fay’s murder, I mean. That was this morning, wasn’t it, before he went to the embassy? K, how can it have only been this morning? Afterwards—when the telephone message came to you from the airfield, he was sure.”

“I see. Then it may interest you to know, perhaps, that Mallory was the one to entertain the suspicions. When I spoke to him this morning, I was concentrating my efforts almost entirely on Jack Byrd and Jerry Hardy, with two or three other possible strings to my bow that I was not at all anxious to use.”

“Are you naming those strings, K?”

“Why not? It will only show you how very unintelligent a fairly intelligent person can be, and I imagine that already you are aware of that. Joan and Allan Lindsay, for two—and Abby Stirling for a barely possible third. Dion, it seemed to me, had a really impregnable alibi.”

“Doesn’t the very fact that you call it an alibi mean that you weren’t quite sure that it was impregnable?”

Sheridan looked up at her quickly.

“You, Tess, are very clever indeed! Still, I assure you that this morning I was quite clear that his alibi was impregnable. There was that telegram from New York so clearly establishing the time of his arrival—and he himself so clearly establishing the time of his departure—and then I knew quite well that there was a murder that had been committed that could not by any possibility have been hurriedly accomplished.… And incredible as it may seem to you, Tess, I did not at first think of the possibility of an airplane. When I actually did, it was not in connection with Mallory at all. I was still hot on Byrd’s or Hardy’s heels.”

“In books,” said Tess, her eyes as wide and innocently critical as a child’s—“in murder stories and mysteries and that sort of book, I mean—it’s always the person with a really perfect alibi that you suspect first, don’t you? … After you’ve read a good many of them, of course.”

“As I have read no more than two or three in an obviously misspent life, the point is somewhat academic,” said Sheridan urbanely. “But as a mere member of the police service, I can assure you that a perfect alibi is an extremely useful thing to have about in an emergency. In such an emergency, for instance, as murder.”

“No—no—I think that you always suspected him,” said Tess, unshaken. “You needn’t look at me like that—I don’t mean that you’re lying to me. It wasn’t the top of your mind—the conscious part of you—that did the suspecting; it was something deeper than that—that part that dreams, and feels—and knows. I don’t care what you call it. They’ve given it a whole lot of pet names in Vienna, haven’t they? … When did you definitely know that you suspected Dion, K?”

“Definitely? When Nell Tappan told me that the malachite and lapis-lazuli backgammon markers were his, of course. Actually, I considered the possibility almost from the minute that young Trent from the airport told me that a tall, stooped, elderly gentleman, with glasses and a limp and a German accent and a black band on his arm, had left Baltimore in a specially chartered plane at Crawford Field Saturday night. It struck me, you see, as too many things to attract your attention for one old gentleman to have—and they would be just about the right number for a talented young Irishman who wanted to emphatically convey the impression that he was somebody else. I did not then, however—nor even much later—give up those other strings for my bows. They had to be literally wrenched out of my hands, and a malachite marker thrust into them before I actually surrendered.”

“I know that you didn’t want to think it was Dion,” she whispered, and for a moment the steady voice was shaken. “I don’t think that I’m an especially grateful person, but I’ll be grateful for that, K, always, as long as I live. Didn’t Nell tell you that my own markers were malachite and lapis lazuli?”

“Oh, yes. She told me that, too.”

“Well, then, didn’t it ever occur to you that the marker we found might have been mine?”

“Yes. That occurred to me. That occurred to me more than once.”

“I thought probably that it did.” She sat silent for a moment, stroking one of the long white hands very softly with the tips of the other, as though she were sorry for them—and Sheridan, noticing for the first time how fragile they looked, in spite of their slim young strength, was sorry for them, too.… When she spoke again, her voice was very gentle and, tragically and incredibly, a little mocking, too.

“When was it that you first suspected me, darling?”

“You?” Under the shock of that unexpected broadside, he felt his heart stagger and his lips whiten; but the words that he forced through them were as evenly spaced as her own. “Almost from the first, I think.… How did you know?”

“How could I help knowing? I’m not precisely a fool, after all! But I wondered—I wondered what I’d done to make you really think of it first.”

“There I am not sure. You see, Tess, I did not even dream that I thought that nightmare of a thing. Something in me built a wall so high, so strong, so impregnable, that every clue that pointed to you shattered to pieces against it. It was like what you were saying about Mallory, perhaps; perhaps he, too, was inside that wall with you, and I did not know that, either.”

He dropped his head in his hands with a gesture so honestly despairing and exhausted that it was robbed of any touch of melodrama, and when he spoke again the voice was as despairing and exhausted as the gesture:

“After all, even in the beginning I realized that you were incredibly cool and collected and clear-headed for one so young, and extraordinarily intelligent for one even very old, Tess. And I knew, too, that you were quite fearless, and quite reckless, and intolerant of coercion of any kind whatever. And that you had lied to me twice before that first night was over.”

“Twice?” The wide silver eyes, the deep silver voice were a little vague, as though she found it difficult to concentrate on this strange girl that he knew so well. “I remember once—about the backgammon marker—but not any other time, truly. And about the marker, what could I possibly have done, K? I knew it was Dion’s, of course, and then I was backed into a corner, and still there was absolutely nothing that I could do about it but lie—even though I realized perfectly, all the time I was doing it, what a desperate chance I was taking. But there was the other chance, too, that I might get away with it—the chance that Fay might have lost her own markers somewhere, and that they wouldn’t ever turn up again—or at least that you wouldn’t know that they were jade and ivory, instead of malachite and lapis lazuli. I had to take that chance, didn’t I?”

“That and several others, unfortunately. Still, it was twice that you lied to me; once about the marker, which you had quite definitely made my business—and once about Dion Mallory, which was quite definitely yours.”

She asked, “What did I tell you about Dion that was a lie?”

“Oh, everything, I think. Not in so many letters and syllables, perhaps, but in every gesture, every inflection, every laugh or smile that implied that what you felt for Mallory was no more than affection, flirtation, diversion—what in this country you call a thrill. It was that lightness and that laughter that gave me the stones and the mortar for the wall that I built and held you both safe in its circle. Did you not know that?”

“Oh, yes, I knew that.”

“Tess, do you then love him so greatly?”

She asked, very simply:

“But, K, don’t you really know?”

“No. Not yet. Not surely and finally. In a little while I will have to be sure, but for now—for both our sakes—let me not be sure. Because now I am going to tell you what I started to speak of a few minutes ago.”

She murmured with the catch of mockery more tragic than tears:

“K, don’t tell me that it’s going to be like Tosca.”

He stared at her, frowning.

“Tosca? Why in heaven’s name should it be like Tosca?”

“Oh, K, you can’t have forgotten? Darling Scotti, and the candles, and all those lovely soprano and baritone hysterics about the lady’s honor or the lover’s life.”

“Now that you describe it so vividly, I recall it perfectly, thanks.… No, it is not going to be in the least like Tosca. I have no bargains whatever to propose. Tess, do you remember exactly what I said that first night when you finally managed to persuade me, how much against my will God only knows, to try to find out who murdered Fay? About what I should feel bound to do if I discovered the murderer?”

“You mean that you would turn the—that you would turn whoever had done it over to the police? Oh, yes, I remember that.… I’ve remembered it quite often.”

“It is about what I said then that I feel quite sure that you should know before you tell me any word further about you and Mallory, and whatever plans you may have made tonight—because when you know what it is that I am going to say, I think it quite sure that you will not wish to tell me anything more at all.… Tess, I do not think that you will be able to believe me, but I still intend to do exactly what I told you that I would do that night.”

She said slowly, the wide eyes on his unwavering and unterrified:

“Oh, but you’re wrong! I can believe it quite easily—I’ve believed it from the first, no matter how horrible it seemed. It was Dion who couldn’t.”

“Dion?”

“He thought that when it actually came down to it, you wouldn’t be able to go through with it—but that was because he couldn’t have gone through with it himself, of course. If you’re Irish, with a good soft, sentimental streak running through you from your heels to your head, it simply wouldn’t occur to you that anyone could actually be coldblooded and hard and ruthless enough to turn over someone that he seemed to—oh, well, call it care for—to the proper authorities to be hanged by the neck until dead. But I told Dion that you were perfectly capable of it. I knew—because I’d be perfectly capable of it myself.”

“You?”

“Yes. I don’t think that either of us can have even one little drop of Irish in us, K. Oh, we’re romantic enough, but I think that most hard people are a little romantic, don’t you? Ruthlessness and romance are very convenient companions—and if you’re loyal into the bargain, they’re pretty dangerous ones. I know that, too. Loyalty’s bred as deep in my bones as it is in yours.… Still, it does seem even now a little fantastic to realize that you’d actually turn me over to the police as a murderess, just to satisfy your pride—and your loyalty to a tradition and an ideal.”

“Turn you over?” His voice was harsh. “Tess, what insanity is this? After all those fine, brave speeches about your hardness and your coldness and your courage, are you now playing a game of quixotic lunacy with me in which you are to offer yourself up as an innocent victim, while the actual murderer goes scot free? There, if you like, is something considerably worse than Sardou at his most dreadful! … You know as well as I do that it is Dion Mallory who killed your sister—that it is Dion Mallory that I intend to turn over to the proper authorities before this night is over.… Are you telling me that you did not know that, Tess?”

Tess, her hands once more wrung hard together, whispered:

“I thought I knew. But there was always just the chance that I might be wrong, wasn’t there? After all, you did suspect me, K. You did say that I had the motive, and the means, and probably the opportunity.”

“That was only to explain what deep underneath I feared—never what I acknowledged, even to myself—never what I actually believed, even in my worst dreams. And you know as well as I that I had Dion’s note to Fay with the red stamp on it, and the ruby glass through which the orange ink on the stamp became clear.”

“I ought to know it,” she said somberly. “I gave them both to you myself.”

“Well, then, surely you must realize that those nine little words sealed his death warrant as definitely as though he had signed a confession.”

“Oh, I realize it well enough, I suppose. Even though I’ve never been absolutely sure that you’d worked out how to use the two things together. You did say at first that you hadn’t any idea what the glass was for. Or was that just a lie to throw me off the track?”

“I did not tell you any lies, Tess—to throw you off the track or otherwise. I was not, you see, by any means sure where that track lay. As for the glass, it was only tonight that I remembered—and while that was not very bright perhaps even for me, I had a long way back to remember. Nineteen years back, to a stern old gentleman with a white beard holding a candle off a Christmas tree so that it shone through a square of red glass, and a little boy on tiptoes could read more clearly the fine orange slanting letters on another red stamp that spelled death to a spy—and a traitor. I can see them now—‘Troops ordered to move forward night of December twentieth.’ Nine words there, too.”

She twisted the hands in her lap together until suddenly they looked tortured, but her voice was as serene as the white, clear face:

“Were there nine in Dion’s?”

“Dion’s? Did he not tell you?”

“No—he couldn’t remember. Doesn’t that sound absurd?” She smiled up at him—a small, careful smile, touching and forlorn. “Oh, he remembered that it was about meeting her Saturday night, of course, but he was in such a daze of fury and despair when he finally got down to the quill-pen and orange-ink business that he couldn’t remember exactly how far he committed himself—as to the time and the date, and things like that.”

“Exactly as far as he possibly could,” Sheridan assured her levelly. “Dion’s read ‘Will meet you in night nursery tonight at eleven.’ As the envelope was postmarked last Saturday morning there couldn’t be even what the law hopefully refers to as a reasonable doubt about that, could there?”

“No.… No, thank God.” He saw, to his incredulous amazement, that her face was suddenly bright and tremulous with tears—a strange, brilliant shower through which her eyes smiled at him, starry and triumphant. “K, where’s your handkerchief? I forgot to bring one; that proves the kind of steady, reliable criminal I’d make, doesn’t it? … Thanks, darling.”

Her fingers touched his fleetingly as she reached for the sheer square of linen that he produced, and at something in their touch he drew back his hand mechanically—something so alien from their usual velvet delicacy that he felt as though they had been drawn rasping across every nerve of his body. Though, strangely, they were not rough at all. They were smooth—a curious, sinister smoothness, as hard and inflexible as though some ugly magic had sheathed the soft flesh in little caps of horn.… He sat staring down at his own hand, as though somehow it had betrayed him.

“For what are you thanking me, Tess?” He did not want to raise his eyes; they, too, were cowards when it came to meeting the inexplicable elation of the eyes still drowned in tears. “For lending you my handkerchief, or for proving beyond any possibility of doubt that Dion Mallory is a murderer?”

Tess put down the drenched handkerchief with a smile that was not for him.

“Is that one of those trick questions where either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will lay you by the heels? Never mind—I’ll answer it. I was thanking you because you’d proved twice over that something that was making me sick with terror—too sick to move or breathe or dare to ask you the answer to it—wasn’t true at all. You see, all the way up those stairs—all the way across the room to this sofa—oh, I didn’t ever, ever think that I’d get to this sofa—I’ve been wondering if by some hideous chance I’d made the most horrible mistake that anyone ever made.… And now you’ve told me that I haven’t. It’s idiotic to cry just because—just because that ghastly weight’s off my mind, I know—but wouldn’t it be even more idiotic not to be thankful to you for lifting it? Here’s your handkerchief; I won’t be such a little fool again, I promise.”

“And what was this mistake that you thought that you had made?”

His eyes were still on his hands, staring with as fierce a concentration as though he could by sheer will power force them to show him the path that the swift, smooth fingers had brushed across them, burnt as deeply and irrevocably into his flesh as a scar.

“K, would you mind if I didn’t talk about it just now? When I try to put it into words—even just inside my head—it makes me feel that same deathly sickness all over again. I can’t possibly put it into words to tell you.”

“I see.… Does it make you sick if I, myself, put it into words? If I suggest that after you had persuaded Mallory that I was distinctly more ruthless than he anticipated, and that he must burn his boats and prepare for flight while you devoted your ingenuity to keeping me well in hand, that only after the boats were burning did it occur to you that I might not have managed to put the two and two together of the glass and the stamp and make the final four that spelt damnation to every plan you had; and that even if I had done so, Mallory might not have committed himself too fatally as to the time and the place in the writing on the stamp? After all, that was the only actual proof that you were sure that I had—’proof so definite that a prosecutor could actually hold it under a jury’s collective nose and have them accept it without the flicker of an eyelash or a split second of debate. Was it not of that possibly fatal error that you were thinking when you came up those stairs to me, Tess?”

“You mean that you believe that I’ve been urging Dion to escape, K? I?” Something in her voice brought his head up this time, and after a moment he forced himself to confront once more the brilliant amazement of her eyes. “You know that does knock all of the wind straight out of my sails! Of course I keep explaining to myself that you don’t really know us—that you can’t really know us, after just a few days—but it isn’t till you say something like that that I can even pretend to believe it.… No, no, you’re wrong there. Dion—Dion simply wasn’t built for flight.”

“You know that, Tess?”

“Oh, K, how could anyone help knowing it? Anyone who had known him even three days? Dion was meant for happiness, for delight, for victory, for gallantry—all those pretty story-book words—never, never for slinking down back alleys—never for looking up sidewise too quickly or too slowly over little dirty glasses of little dirty drinks in dirty, hateful little places. You know the kind of things—you’ve been on the track of that kind before, haven’t you? Port Said, and Port Limon, and the back streets of Shanghai and Liverpool and Cairo and Budapest—we used to drag around through some of those with Dad when we were just scraps of things, and since we were bigger there have been trips and cruises.… But even now I can’t bear to look at them, all bent up over their glasses—”

“Yes,” he said, “I have been on that track before. It is not, as you foresee, a pretty one.… How, Tess, were you so sure of that?”

“Probably because I have too much imagination. Probably because, even before I knew him, I was afraid that one of them might look like Dion,” she replied, in that clear, grave voice more ominous by far than anything stressed or harried. “You remember telling me so that first night at the Temples’, K? That I had too much imagination to be either a good criminal or a good detective? You know, I think that you are right. But I have enough imagination to see what it would be like to be a bad criminal—a criminal like Dion, for instance, who would sit in dark, shadowy corners over a soiled tin table, and forget every day or so to get a shave, but never, never forget to take one of those dirty little drinks even before he took his morning coffee in the tall thick glass—nor to jump rather badly if someone came up too quickly or too loudly, and most especially if someone laid a hand on his shoulder.… You know the kind of people who jump if you put a hand on their shoulder, don’t you, K?”

“Too well,” he told her. “A great deal too well.”

“Yes. Well, Dion’s one of them. You know that, too, I suppose. He’s one of the kind whose bones would turn into dust and whose blood would turn into water while he was waiting for that hand to bear down. At least, that’s how I figured it out, quite a long time ago.”

“And that, Tess, was what you told him tonight?”

“That was one of the things that I told him tonight,” she corrected gently.

“He agreed to it?”

She considered that carefully for a moment, and when she spoke again her voice was a little deeper than usual:

“Not just at first. It isn’t a particularly easy thing to agree to, do you think? To admit that in disaster and danger you’d deteriorate—that you’d shrivel up and be inadequate and pitiful—I’d hate to admit that, wouldn’t you, K?”

“Very greatly. Still, you forced him to admit it?”

She murmured, in the voice so far away from him that it almost seemed that she was talking to someone else:

“I think I did.… I’m almost sure that I did.… The part that makes it hardest is that I won’t ever be quite sure, I suppose.”

“I have no doubt that he will find means to strengthen your assurance,” Sheridan commented grimly. “Even in jail he will not be held entirely incommunicado, you know! And with the remarkably liberal point of view that your great and generous country has towards murder in its various manifestations, there is surely a fair chance that after not too long an interval he will be able to convey them in person, is there not?”

She sat staring at him blankly, the pupils of the silver-gray eyes so dilated that they were suddenly as jet black as her lashes.

“You mean that you think that they wouldn’t have—that they wouldn’t convict him? Oh, no—oh, no, you’re wrong there, K! You’re either overrating or underrating the liberality of this great and generous country. Gangsters, maybe, or beautiful ladies if they can manage the right amount of tears on the right length of eyelashes—but a Britisher who poisoned in cold blood the most ravishing-looking creature in North America, just because she thought that he ought to marry her? A heavenly, soft little scrap of a thing that didn’t weigh a hundred pounds, and was nineteen on her last birthday, and the daughter of one of the most eminent public figures in the United States? Oh, you know as well as I do that they’d hang him—that was the one thing that Dion and I agreed on from the first.… Though it—though it wouldn’t be here that they’d do it, as a matter of fact. We don’t hang people in the District of Columbia. The twelve good men and true who would undoubtedly have taken great pleasure in hanging him if they ever got the chance are probably drawing nice long foggy breaths of British air while we’re sitting here talking about it.”

“British?”

“Yes. Don’t they teach you anything about international law in that wonderful Criminalistic Institute of yours, K? And you with an ambassador for a grandfather, too!”

“You are referring, perhaps, to diplomatic immunity?” he inquired austerely. “I have heard of that. But I may also remind you that it is entirely a question of the discretion of the sovereign whom the suspect represents in however minor a degree as to whether he is turned over to the local authorities or dealt with ultimately by those of his own country. In the end, it would make singularly little difference, I imagine.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Tess agreed, the black eyes not wavering a fraction of a hair’s breadth from his. “And even if there was a temporary slip up here, in Liverpool, or Buenos Aires—one way or another I’m sure that you and your good friends the police would get your man.… You’d get him just as surely, even though not quite as satisfactorily, if you never even managed to slip handcuffs over his wrists. You’d get him from the very first time that he was afraid to turn his head to see who it was that was touching him on the shoulder.”

“A highly gratifying tribute to our prowess,” commented the representative of the police force grimly. “Still we would hardly consider a case closed in our dossiers because somewhere in the byways of Central America a young man was developing a bad attack of nerves if someone came up behind him.”

“No.… No, I said that you probably wouldn’t consider it satisfactory—but, one way or another, it would still check up to your credit, wouldn’t it? The police always get their man. I was paying you a compliment.”

“Were you, indeed? And their woman—do the police always get their woman, Tess?”

“Their woman? Just exactly what do you mean by that?”

“Just exactly what I say. What did you think that I meant?”

She made no answer to the slightly sardonic tone, apparently contenting herself in maintaining the unswerving vigilance of the eyes riveted on the dark face of the young man from Vienna.

“Were you so sure, Tess, that any twelve good men and true would send you back scatheless and vindicated to this lovely spring world that is all yours—or were you even surer that I would never have turned you over to them?”

For a brief moment the eyes went wandering, seeking for the focal point in this new attack.

“Turn me over? Oh, you mean all that about suspecting me before I was sure that you hadn’t deciphered the writing on the postage stamp? I was really just sounding you out. I had to know—I had to know how strong your case was against Dion.”

“And you were brave enough to be willing to risk your neck to find out—by calling my attention to the fact of the strength of the case against you? You cared enough for Mallory to do that?”

“My neck?” She lifted one of the long white hands to it, the fingers touching its smooth roundness delicately, and the lovely sweep of her mouth suddenly tilted in rueful mirth. “Oh, I wasn’t doing that exactly, was I? I think that you’re giving me more credit than I deserve—in more ways than you realize. It didn’t seem to me that you had any real case against me at any time. If I had thought so, I probably shouldn’t have even hinted at the possibility. I’m not precisely a coward—but, K, no one ever wanted to live more than I do—no one ever. It’s not that I’m afraid to die, but I’m terribly, terribly afraid not to live. I know how to do it awfully well, you see; most people don’t—they get it all tangled up with regrets and worries and irresolutions—when all that’s really important is life waiting for them to live. How can anyone get tired of just breathing, and feeling, and—oh, knowing that no matter how cruelly and senselessly and wickedly it can hurt you, it can’t ever, ever beat you. I know that now, K. I’ve beaten it—it can’t beat me.”

The eyes holding his were no longer black enemies playing sentry in the cool, exquisite face; they were as clear as the lost War Baby’s—that small scrap, gallant in her flying scarlet scarf and stubby mittens, who had faced him undaunted across long-melted snows, victorious even in woeful defeat, because she had not learned in six brave years one single concession yielded by the vanquished; in spite of all his superior taunts and strategies and extra measure of years and brain and brawn, he had still been unable to wring from those small pale lips one sound that admitted defeat—one step backward to grant that she was standing on conquered territory.… Well, whatever the sixteen years that lay between the snow and crystals of that winter, and the crystal snows of the lilacs and peonies, scenting the breeze that blew spring silently into every corner of the small, hushed green room, Charity de Tessaincourt Stuart had not yet learned to know when she was beaten.… He felt suddenly something salt and bitter stinging in the little empty place where his heart should be at the thought of all that valiant grace, too serene even for defiance, beaten down finally into the dust of irretrievable defeat.… After a moment he said, gently:

“Give me your hand, Tess.”

She stretched it out to him, unhesitatingly, with a grave smile of amused wonder—it was steadier than his own, and for a moment he felt only the cool freshness of her palm pressed against his.

“No, turn it over—that way—yes, now I can see.… What is it that you have been doing to your fingers?”

She sat staring in silence for a moment at the pale upturned hand cupped in the dark shadows of his—at the little balls of the fingertips with the faint, rosy gloss almost like varnish over the curiously wrinkled skin, and then, with a small shrug, that held in it as much amusement as resignation, let it be completely relaxed in his.

“It’s nail polish; didn’t you know? I thought that you’d guessed when I touched your hand. The kind that they call Dawn Flush. I don’t ever wear gloves; I told you that the first night—remember? But you didn’t tell me whether anyone had ever tried liquid nail polish as a substitute, did you?”

“You were very anxious not to leave any fingerprints here tonight, I gather. Was there, perhaps, some especial reason for that?”

“You couldn’t write it off to my simply being an old-fashioned girl, who’d been brought up to believe that ladies didn’t call on gentlemen at midnight?”

“I had not been led to believe,” he said, “that the question of leaving fingerprints behind her was involved in a lady’s visit, however close to midnight.… There were other reasons, surely?”

“Surely,” she said. “Though, curiously enough, they don’t seem particularly important to me. London Bridge won’t fall down if anyone discovers that I was here tonight; but I’ll admit quite honestly that I’d rather that no one but you, and Dion, and I knew about it.… I think I was rather clever about the polish. I had to use two coats because after twenty minutes or so the first one just shrivels up your fingers—but the second one makes them as smooth and non-committal as any rubber gloves you ever saw.… Might I have my hand back now, if you’re quite through with it?”

Sheridan, releasing it without even the lightest pressure, acquiesced pleasantly:

“Quite, thanks. I am to gather, then, that there was some special reason why you did not wish anyone to know that you were here tonight, but that for the time being at least I am not to know what that reason was. So then, Tess, shall we forget all about it for the present? And move back ten or twenty minutes to the time that you were explaining to me that Mallory was so blind and crazed with rage when he sent Fay the pleasant little note about the races Saturday morning that he could not even remember what he had written on the red stamp. He had already, then, made up his mind to kill Fay when he wrote it?”

“Saturday morning? Oh, good heavens, K, even you ought to know that Dion couldn’t possibly have planned out all the details of a highly complicated murder in cold blood hours and hours before he was actually going to try to bring it off. People like Dion simply aren’t made that way. It’s perfectly true that he was furious when he sent her the note Saturday morning agreeing to see her that night—the whole thing was beginning to sound like blackmail to him, and I imagine that most generous, chivalrous people have quite a definite prejudice against blackmail. But he still kept thinking that he could make her see that what she was trying to force him to do was plain madness. That was why he agreed to try once more.”

“And just what was she trying to force him to do, Tess? Or is that a secret, too?”

“No, that’s not a secret—not now—not from you. That’s part of what I have to explain to you. She wanted him to marry her. I told you that a little while ago when we were talking about the jury, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Now I remember. And why, if she was as ravishing as you say, did he not want to marry her?”

Tess said, steadily:

“Because he wanted to marry someone else. He wanted to marry her rather badly.”

“And she—this other girl—did she want to marry him?”

“I don’t think that I should answer that, K. Let’s just say that lately she’d found out some things that made it—that made it impossible. At least she thought it was impossible. Maybe she was wrong. Dion was quite sure that she was.”

“I need not ask if that other girl was you, Tess?”

“No,” she said. “You needn’t ask that.”

“Very well. Curious as it may seem to you, it is the very last question that I care to ask you. Let us return, then, to’ this final act that drove Mallory back against the wall, so trapped and desperate that murder seemed to him the only possible solution.… Or perhaps I should not permit you to return even that far. As we who are watchdogs on the trail of crime honorably but somewhat disingenuously put it, anything that you say may be used against you, you see.… Or against him, which is probably more important to you.… Because I am right in thinking that you were not actually involved in Fay’s murder, am I not?”

She answered, the white face a little whiter:

“Not even remotely, of course. Unless you call being an accessory after the fact remotely. You can’t believe that I’d have dragged you into this ghastly business if I’d ever dreamed that I’d be even as remotely involved as that, can you, K?”

“Since we seem to be putting some of the cards that we have been concealing up our sleeves out on the table where we can both look them over, that has most certainly been one of the possibilities that I have considered more than once. It struck me, you see, that a fairly astute young man with an excellent scientific equipment who was even casually following up a trail that had unexpectedly opened out before him might prove a rather dangerous person to have at large, and that the safest place to keep him might well be directly under your eyes, where you could see precisely what he was up to, and back-track and mislead him at every possible favorable opportunity. At any rate, you will hardly deny that that is obviously what Mallory decided to do when he offered to share these quarters with me. Was it with malice aforethought that you suggested the arrangement to him?”

“I’ve already told you,” she answered, in a voice suddenly and inexplicably shaken by a low passion that she held well in leash, “that I hadn’t the remotest idea that Dion had anything to do with Fay’s death until you showed me that malachite backgammon marker. Of course I knew then that he’d been there, but until that moment I didn’t even dream that he’d laid eyes on her at any time that night—or it was morning before you left, wasn’t it? I remember that we were waiting for the dawn—and I believed that he was practically in New York. No matter what you think of me—and you have a right to think almost anything hateful—I can’t see how you could possibly imagine that I would be insane enough to drag you in to track down Dion as a murderer when the thing on the surface looked enough like suicide to satisfy Sherlock Holmes himself.”

“That is true, I suppose. What happened afterwards was as much my fault as yours; I should never have permitted myself to touch the whole hateful affair with the best of rubber gloves and a ten-foot pole. And once involved, my poor Tess, what alternative had you save to trick and confuse me to the very best of your ability?”

“I’m glad you see that,” she told him, the low voice small and desolate. “I’ve felt like such a despicable little beast, sitting there cheating and tricking and lying to you when it was my fault that you were there at all. I used to turn my face away, so that I couldn’t see that rhyme on the tile of the night-nursery mantel—you know, the one with the little boy sitting on the stile?

“And after that, where?

Straight down the crooked lane,

And all round the square.

That was where I was trying to lead you—or mislead you would be truer, I suppose. And you had been so kind to me—so dear to me—trying to help me all the time—”

“Yes, that tile I remember very well.” He closed his tired eyes for a minute, and it rose once more before him, as gay and fresh and careless in its primrose yellows and water blues and leaf greens as spring itself.… He remembered how he had seen it first as he knelt on the hearth with the empty glass in his hand. “But it was not straight down even a crooked lane that you were trying to lead me, was it? Down a lane, yes—and all round the square most assuredly—but never straight. The straight way I had to find myself, and from beginning to end it has been a lonely and hateful business. Because you are quite right. All the time I wanted to help you—you who were still the little girl who so many years ago had been my brave enemy. I wanted it, I think, more than I have ever wanted anything in my life.… I still want it.”

She said, in that small lost voice:

“Life’s stupid, isn’t it? Even when I love it best I can see that. Don’t want it any more, please, darling. It’s no good.… Because now at last I can be honest.”

“Do not, I beg, be too honest. That is what I was trying to tell you when I warned you that every word that you said now could be used against you or Mallory. Would you not, perhaps, rather that I waited and asked Mallory himself these questions—that I did not ask you anything more at all?”

“No; I don’t think so.” She sat silent, twisting the ruby ring from side to side as though it were a little scale in which she was weighing her thoughts. “You wouldn’t use them, I believe, even if they would help you, and none of these things would really help you at all—except to understand. You’ve already patched all the little bits together that made up the murder itself into a neat enough picture to convince any jury, if you really want to convince one. These that I’m telling you are just—oh, what do they call them? The events that led up to the crime. That’s what you want to know now, isn’t it? And the special event that did finally precipitate things wasn’t a note at all; it was a telephone call from Fay from the Tappans’ Saturday evening at almost seven. That was the first time he realized that the whole thing was perfectly hopeless; that the game was up, once and for all. Fay had been drinking quite a lot—he could tell that even over the telephone—and by the time she’d finished talking he knew that he stood just about as much chance of shaking her in her purpose of marrying him as he stood of shaking the rock of Gibraltar.… So he decided to kill her.”

“With no more than an hour to make all his plans? He works fast, your Mallory.”

“Yes. This time he had to work very fast.… He realized, you see, that later he would have to work even faster.”

“But just what made him realize, Tess, that there was not one single chance left of convincing her of her folly in trying to force him into a marriage that he did not desire? He had managed it before, I gather?”

“Oh, yes, he’d managed it several times before. But she hadn’t known then who the girl that he really wanted to marry was. She hadn’t really been sure that there was another girl.”

“I see. And when did she find out that this other girl was you?”

She lifted the hand with the ring as though in protest, and then with an unhappy smile, let it drop.

“Oh, I suppose you’re right; there isn’t any use in trying to keep up what’s simply a farcical pretense any longer. And I do want to be honest with you; poor K, I surely owe you all the honesty that I can drag out of my heart and brain, don’t I? … Fay found it out Wednesday night. It was all mixed up in that filthy row that we had when I cornered her on the Raoul Chevalier—X business. I was pretty frantic with rage myself, and I was going at her hammer and tongs when she saw the ring.”

“This one that you are wearing now?”

“Yes; this one. It’s Dion’s, of course—or rather, it was Dion’s mother’s. I didn’t know that Fay had ever laid eyes on it—neither did Dion. But it seems that she’d seen it—oh, months and months ago—when she got Timothy to let her in one afternoon to wait for Jerry. She came early, and she spent the time that Timothy was out with Susan fixing sandwiches and mint juleps, rummaging through Dion’s desk and dressing table, trying to find any nice incriminatory notes from devoted ladies that might be useful later on. She didn’t find them, but she did find the ring, stuck away in the back of one of the dressing-table drawers. And when she saw it again on my finger, I think that she literally went out of her head with rage and despair. She—she really always hated me, you know. It was Mother that she loved; she was awfully like her in a lot of ways, and when Dad made me take hold of things—afterwards—and try to take Mother’s place and manage her, I think that she nearly went crazy with hate and jealousy and resentment.… I probably made a horrible botch of things. I can see that now.” She smiled up at him, though her eyes and voice were suddenly thick with tears. “I make a fairly good job of managing myself most of the time, but anyone else—especially anyone as high-strung and hair-trigger as Fay—I’m just not sensible and well-balanced and old enough for that. No matter how much I try to pretend to Fay and you and Dion, K, I’m not really very old, you know.”

No, he thought despairingly—not very old, poor child. Poor, desperate child.… After a moment he asked aloud:

“But this ruby ring—it is the right hand that you wear it on, is it not? You are not actually engaged to Mallory?”

“No—not really engaged. I told you that once, didn’t I? I knew that Dad would never in this world forgive us if we became actually engaged while he was off in some corner of Central America. As soon as he got back we intended to announce it formally; I didn’t see any reason why Dad should object. Dion wasn’t what he would consider a particularly brilliant parti, but after all he was well born and well bred, with a little money of his own and an awfully attractive old place in Ireland—and Dad’s always had a weak spot for the Diplomatic Corps. He likes the glitter that hangs around even a second secretary! So I didn’t see why there should be any particular trouble—until Fay saw the ring and told me.”

“What did she tell you, Tess?”

“That Dion belonged to her. That while I’d been away last winter they’d had—what’s the prettiest word for it, K?—an affair. That if I dared to even hint to anyone that we were engaged, she’d make a series of scenes that would rock our happy little household and the British embassy and the whole United Kingdom and the United States to their foundations.” She slipped the ring from her finger and sat frowning at it abstractedly as it lay glowing in the palm of her hand; then, with that same gesture—the gesture of a sleep walker, blind and precise—she returned it to her finger. “She was going to send anonymous letters to Dad and the ambassador and a whole series of ghastly little tidbits to X to use in his column.… She was perfectly willing to ruin herself and what was left of her reputation in the process, but she made it extremely clear that she had every intention of dragging me down with her when she went.”

“Fay had weapons, then, that she could use against you, Tess? You, too, had been having an affair with Dion?”

“I?” She looked at him blankly for a moment, not seeing him at all; seeing only the small, frantic, tortured creature whose frenzy had brought them all to this pass. “Oh, no; I don’t have affairs. But I imagine that she really could have dug up things that would have hurt me a good deal. I’ve been as indiscreet at one time and another as most people who think that they’re decent enough and honorable enough and—oh, well, fine enough to be as safe from suspicion as Caesar’s wife. I didn’t worry so much about that, though.… I worried about what she told me about herself and Dion.”

“You had both known him well for some time? He told me at the Temples’, I think, that he had been here for three or four years.”

“Yes, he had; but I never really knew him at all until this spring. We only came back here ourselves last year, and I’ve been away as much as possible; it’s been so simply hateful at home. I don’t believe that I did more than dance with him a few times, and talk to him once or twice at teas, until this last two months. All that about—about Fay happened while I was off on the South Seas cruise this winter; she only came out this fall, but apparently from the moment that she first laid eyes on him, she completely lost her head. I didn’t know it then—I doubt whether even he did—but I do think that part of it was true.”

“There are other parts, apparently, that you think were not?”

“About their having a really serious affair? No, I don’t believe that that was true. They had had a rather violent flirtation at one time, and there was one episode that was ugly enough to justify a good deal of what Fay implied, but he wasn’t ever really in love with her, I know that.”

“He is fortunate in having your confidence so completely,” remarked Sheridan a little dryly. “I remember that you told me that at one time a number of people thought that they were engaged.”

“Did I? Oh, yes. I remember—that was really just to throw you off the track about Dion and me. I thought that probably you would be more interested in helping me—more interested in me, really—if you believed that the field was quite clear, and I wanted to protect Dion by making you think that he was awfully fond of Fay. I can see now that that was horrid of me—and dreadfully cheap and unfair.”

“Possibly. It was a remarkably accurate guess, however—which probably proves that I too am cheap and horrid. What was it that Fay and Mallory did that made you believe that it was impossible for you to marry him—that one ugly episode that you spoke of?”

“Oh, that!” Her fingers were once more restless with the ring that had belonged to Dion’s mother. “It was the usual thing, except that she tricked him into it. No, you needn’t smile—she told me that herself. She was quite proud of it.… It happened in January, I think. Half a dozen of them had been up in Philadelphia for a house party, and Dion was motoring Fay back alone in his roadster. That was the time that they were having that flirtation that I was telling you about, you know, and he really was quite keen about her. About seven o’clock they stopped for dinner in a little hotel in Wilmington—a perfectly decent, respectable place, Dion said—and suddenly just when they were finishing their coffee and the landlady had come in to ask them if everything was perfectly satisfactory, Fay gave a clutch at Dion’s arm, and said that she had the most ghastly pain in her side and she simply couldn’t go on—that she was afraid that it was her appendix again, and could the landlady possibly give her and her husband a room for the night? The doctor had said that there wasn’t any danger at all if she lay down and kept perfectly quiet. Well, Dion was too staggered to say anything—he was too staggered even to think. After all, what could he say? There was Fay, with her bags and her appendix and a perfectly good room—and there was he.… Only after that, he wasn’t quite so crazy about her. She had to tell him that it wasn’t the first time that she’d made a fool out of a man—and whether he was right or wrong about it, he didn’t believe that it would be the last. So as far as he was concerned there weren’t any more ugly episodes—even Fay admitted that.… And in March I came back from the cruise.”

“You came back from the cruise, and after that Fay did not count even one little bit. Is that what happened?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what happened—until Wednesday night. After that she counted quite a lot.”

“That little note that we found beside the empty bottle of hyoscine—the note that made it sound as though it was telling you that she was about to kill herself—that note was to Dion, was it not? Written from here with one of Hardy’s pencils, while she was waiting for Mallory to come in?”

“You are clever, aren’t you, K? We wondered whether you’d worked that out, too. Yes—it was written here, Thursday night, sometime around ten o’clock. I sent Dion a note by special messenger, after the hideous quarrel that Fay and I had Wednesday, letting him know that she’d told me about Wilmington and everything else, and that we’d have to see each other Thursday night, and talk over—and talk over everything; but that in the meantime he absolutely must keep out of her way, no matter what she did to try and see him.”

“She was in a dangerously excited state, you think?”

“I think that she was insane, K.… All Wednesday night she sat up writing dozens and dozens of horrible little pieces of filth about Dion and me and herself that she apparently intended to distribute all over Washington—things like, ‘Why not ask the hospitable landlady of the Felton Inn at Wilmington what distinguished young diplomat with more than a touch of the brogue spent far too many hours there with a blonde and beautiful Washington debutante on the night of January fifth?’ She showed them all to me Thursday morning—that particular one was meant for X’s column, and you can imagine what it would have done to Dion’s career!”

“Yes. That does not require much imagination.”

“I couldn’t bear that,” she said, very simply and gently. “To watch Dion—Dion, who was born for happiness and brilliance and success—go down and down into the dirt of ugly scandal and failure—I couldn’t bear it, that’s all. I suppose that life’s made up of the things you can stand and the things you can’t; well, this was the one that I couldn’t. Dion sent word back to me that he’d get out of town for the day—tell them at the embassy that he had to see Jerry, who was worse—and that we could meet and have dinner at a little farmhouse in Maryland that we’d been to several times before, and talk things over. That’s where we were while Fay was here, waiting for Dion.”

“She realized that he was with you?”

“Well, hardly. I’d simply told her that Freddy Parrish and I were going out in the country somewhere for dinner, and I borrowed Freddy’s car, and asked her if she would back me up if Fay tried to start anything. Freddy said she would, of course, like the trump she is.”

“Freddy,” said the young man from Vienna, “is a lady that I would like very much to know better. You were going to tell me about that note that Fay left for Dion, were you not?”

“Yes. She wrote it sometime between ten and eleven, apparently, because at a little after eleven Timothy came in and showed her a telegram from Dion, saying that he was spending the night in a Baltimore hotel and wouldn’t be back until morning. So she left the note and came back to the house. I was in bed with the door locked when she got in, and when she started rattling it, I told her that she could shake the house down if she wanted to, but that it was going to stay locked—I’d had enough—I was through. And I was, K. It had been rather a dreadful evening—Dion couldn’t see my point of view, and I couldn’t see his, and we both wanted to so badly. I thought that if we could only get a breathing space, we might be able to think straighter and decide what to do next—and when she told me next morning that she’d decided to go down to the Tappans’ for the week-end I felt—oh, I felt as idiotically light-hearted as that poor little lunatic Pippa who thought that God was in His heaven because the snail was on the thorn.… I didn’t know then that she’d telephoned to Dion before she left.”

“That was last Friday morning?”

“Yes—Friday.… You remember how you measured the scrap of note paper that Dion put beside the hyoscine bottle, and how you were sure that someone had cut off almost half an inch of it? Well, you were perfectly right, of course. She’d put on a postscript, telling him that if he didn’t telephone her by eleven the next morning, she’d simply go straight over to the embassy and tell them the whole story. So he telephoned, naturally. He kept the note because he wanted to show her what a crazy, reckless thing it was to leave a thing like that lying around on a desk where anyone could see it; and then Saturday night when he decided—when he decided that there was only one way out and that he could quite easily make it look like suicide, especially with that note left beside her on the table, he only had to snip off the telephone bit, because, of course, that would have given the whole thing away.”

“Rather.… And what did he say to her in that telephone conversation Friday morning?”

“He promised to have dinner with her Monday when she came back from the Tappans’. I think he tried to make her believe that I’d—that I’d exaggerated what he felt about me a good deal—and I know he told her that I was just wearing the ring for a week because of a bet that I’d won at the races.” The bravely tinted lips trembled for a moment, piteously, but her eyes were as clear and steady as ever as she explained carefully, “He was perfectly right to make her think that, of course; we’d decided Thursday night that he’d have to do something like that to keep her quiet until we found space to turn around in—but I did hate it—I did hate it when she told me about the ring over the telephone Friday evening.”

“Friday evening?”

“Yes—you remember—when she called me up to ask for that invitation to Temples’ party, and I wouldn’t get it for her? I told you about that a long time ago, didn’t I? And I told you that maybe if I’d gotten it for her, none of these things would have happened?” She did not stir, but he saw the irises of her eyes turn to jet black again.

“K, doesn’t that seem frightful? If she hadn’t laughed when she told me that he’d only loaned me the ruby ring for a week because he’d lost a racing bet, we might all be sitting here laughing and talking, and you could see for yourself that Fay still had hair like yellow flowers, and eyes like blue flowers, just like the ones that you remembered sixteen years ago.”

“Tess, about that you must not torture yourself. Once before I told you that, and I tell you so again. These things would have happened, no matter what you said to Fay on the telephone this last Friday night. The roots of disaster ran even deeper than sixteen years, I think.… After Fay had spoken to you you said that she called Mallory, I think. Do you know what she said in that message?”

“She said—” Tess halted, her eyes searching his face as though it would tell her things that he himself might hold secret from her forever. “K, it isn’t that I mind telling you—I know that I owe you all the truth in the world, and the least that I can do is to try and pay my debts—but why do you want to know all this? All that you have to know, professionally, is how he murdered her, and that you’ve worked out for yourself—why he did it doesn’t make any difference, does it?”

“Perhaps not. You are as good a judge of that as I am. Premeditated murder, you see, is apt to prejudice either a policeman or a juryman, Tess; and while in the eyes of the law premeditation may consist of no greater space of time than will allow a knife to rise and fall, in the eyes of the men and women who may be called upon to pronounce sentence on Mallory, it would make a vast difference, I believe, if they were convinced that he had not planned the whole thing carefully beforehand.”

“You mean you want to help him?”

“I mean that I want to be entirely fair to him. You are the best judge as to whether any assistance that I could render would now be of the slightest use.”

She said, her voice suddenly mortally weary:

“Oh, I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way—about those men and women on the jury, I mean—but I do really want you to understand that Dion simply couldn’t do that kind of thing in cold blood. I do think you two would have been such awfully good friends. I thought so from the very first minute that I saw you that night at the Temples’.… All right, I’ll tell you all of it, then. Where was I when I stopped? Oh, yes, about her calling him Friday night on the telephone.… She caught him just before he was starting out for the theater with me and the Chevaliers—and she said that what she wanted to do was to beg him to have one last party Saturday night, just as soon as he could get away from the Temples’ dinner dance. He said that she really sounded awfully gentle and pathetic—talked about understanding things much better now, and that this really would be a kind of a farewell party—that they could just have a few drinks, and play some backgammon, and then they’d both have it for a happy memory always, instead of all the ghastly squabbles that they’d been going through lately. Oh, yes—and he was to bring his backgammon markers, because she’d lost hers that afternoon shooting craps with Nell Tappan. And he must write her a note the next morning, playing their old stamp game, so that she’d get it when she arrived home from the Tappans’, and would really and truly be sure that he was coming. He fell for the whole thing—though he did hate the stamp part—and he never told me a word about it until—afterwards. He didn’t want to worry me. That has its funny points, if you have a sense of humor. Personally, I doubt whether I have much of a one myself.”

“There I believe that you underrate yourself—and I am quite sure that you are the only woman in the world who would admit it, even on the rack. But this secret writing on the stamps, Tess, you did not know about that?”

“Do you think I’d have handed you over his note if I’d even dreamed of it? No, that was a little trick that some man who’d been in the Secret Service showed her a long time ago. She used to get around the servants’ attractive habit of tampering with her mail that way, and apparently she showed it to all of her most favored admirers. Dion said they used it quite a lot this November and December.… But I hadn’t even seen the red glass until it fell out of her bag that night.”

“I should have guessed that. And between that telephone call Friday and her final call Saturday evening, nothing of any importance happened?”

“Nothing that you could measure or put your finger on. We went back to the house after the theater, and Dion helped me get the supper ready in the kitchenette—that’s where he noticed the eggs and things, and it gave him the idea for the pick-me-up, he said—no; Saturday here must have been peaceful enough to suit anyone. But something must have happened at the Tappans’ to start Fay off. Heaven knows what it was, but by Saturday night she was insane enough to qualify for any padded cell in the land; she’d apparently decided that we were going to try to get married while she was out of town, or something like that—at any rate, when she called up Dion around seven Saturday, she carried on like a raving maniac and told him that if he didn’t take her to the Temples’ dance and tell the whole world that they were engaged, she’d go herself and do it for him. And he believed her. I would have believed her, too. She was nothing more nor less than a maniac when she lashed herself into one of those states.… He still had a vague, faint hope that he might be able to talk her out of it … but it was then that he began to make his plans.”

“Around seven. Did the forgotten attaché case of the distinguished tariff expert drop like manna a little before eight in order to provide him with an alibi, or was he counting on an alibi as a part of his scheme?”

“Oh, as a matter of fact, Dion found that case around five behind the sofa in the embassy guest room—just where he said he found it at eight o’clock when he told you the story—but he promptly dropped it back again, partly because he detested old Harrington, and partly because he thought it might come in very handy as another kind of an alibi.”

“Another kind?”

“Yes—he thought that perhaps Fay might let him off the party with her if he told her that he had to run up to New York on business with official papers. He planned from the first to rediscover them on a final hunt around eight—too late to catch the last train to New York, and to call her up at our house when she got in between nine and ten and explain the situation—but when she called up half out of her head with hysterics at seven o’clock, he saw that there wasn’t a chance of even trying to persuade her but that it might—it might work in extraordinarily well as a real alibi.”

“As it did. Very ingenious indeed.” He did not want to meet those eyes that were waiting bravely for his, lost in some region far beyond weakness or terror. “So then what, Tess?”

“So then—so then you’ve guessed most of the rest of it, haven’t you, K? Most of it you guessed aloud to me, and some of it—quite a lot of it—I helped you with before I realized what I was doing. He went straight from the Temples’ dance to the house; he didn’t dare change his clothes first, naturally, but he knew that he would have a chance to—afterwards, when he came back to get the attaché case here. He’d already worked everything out about the airplane at Crawford Field, in case—in case he had to use it—and he had the note that Fay had left on his desk Thursday and Jerry’s two bottles of hyoscine in his pocket. He knew that I had some that I’d got for Fay—I’d told him that I kept it in my bathroom cabinet because I was afraid of the effect on her heart, but he wasn’t sure that mine would be enough. He had to have quite a lot, so that it would work quickly, you see. He’d already decided that he would give it to her in a pick-me-up, because that was the only way that he could be sure of hiding the bitterness in a huge dose.… You see, he knew the way she felt about taking bitter things.”

“And then?”

“The door was on the latch when he got to our house just a little after eleven, and Fay was waiting for him in the night nursery—she had the backgammon board ready for him, and even though she’d been drinking a frightful lot, she was still perfectly sober enough to realize what was happening, and absolutely adamant about going on later to the party at the Temples’ and announcing their engagement to the assembled company. She even had her dress and cloak and slippers all laid out in her bedroom ready to put on, all white and silver—like a bride.… He had to put them away, afterwards. That’s one of the things that took him so long—but he thought if we found them there, it wouldn’t look so much like suicide.… He was right about that, don’t you think?”

“Quite right. And then, Tess?”

“And then—and then they played six games of backgammon.… And he told her that he didn’t dare to take her on to Cara Temple’s unless she would take something to pull herself together. And she suggested the pick-me-up herself.… And he went into the kitchenette and ground up two grains of the hyoscine—over a teaspoonful—and floated it in between the brandy and the egg yolk—and brought it back to her—and she drank it. He says—he said, that he couldn’t be sure, but that it looked as though she died before she even drew another breath.… Do I have to tell any more, K?”

Something in her voice made him glance up swiftly, and he saw that the sleep walker had awakened, and that the serene white oval of her face had frozen into a mask of horror.

“Forgive me, my Tess. I should not have allowed you to tell me this much, even. No more, you can be sure.”

“It’s stupid of me,” she whispered through stiff lips, “to be afraid now—when there’s so little more to tell—and nothing more to be afraid of.… He did everything just as you worked it out, except that I don’t remember that you thought of the cigarette butts. He smoked about twenty or thirty of his own brand—Gulaks, you know—he said he’d made a special effort to call your attention to them at the Temples’ dinner.… He kept them all in one ashtray, and when he left the house he took them, and the eggshell, and the two smashed-up hyoscine bottles that he’d already washed the labels off of, and the hyoscine pills that were left over from Fay’s bottle that he got out of the bathroom cabinet and some from Jerry’s, and threw them all into a public burning dump between here and Baltimore.… You knew that he motored as far as Baltimore, didn’t you?

“Yes. That I was almost sure of.”

“He wondered—did you telephone Johns Hopkins to find out whether anyone had actually taken any serum to Hasbrouck Heights?”

“Not until too late tonight to obtain actual proof.… Before tonight, you see, I was by no means sure enough of my case to warrant such a call—and, as you have already guessed, I did not want to be sure. But when Mrs. Tappan literally thrust the proof into my hands, I did consider it my duty to close the case, and I tried to reach the proper authorities at Johns Hopkins to verify my suspicions. I tried from the cigar store on my way in from Joan Lindsay’s, the same cigar store through which I also endeavored to reach this house and yours. In all three cases I was both unsuccessful—and unregretful.”

“You didn’t want it to be Dion, did you, K?”

“No,” he said evenly, “I did not want it to be Dion. There was only one person in all the world that I wanted it less to be. Though since now we know that it is Dion, there are several things that I will still need somehow to clear up. But not tonight, poor child. Tonight—well, suppose that now, tonight, I see that you get safely home, and wait until tomorrow morning before we even think of any more questions? Mallory’s car is only halfway down the block outside; we could use that—or if you prefer, I could call a taxi.”

“I’d rather not do either, if you don’t mind. All things being equal, it would be a good deal pleasanter if no one did know that I’d been here tonight. I rented one of those Drive-Your-Own cars yesterday for a week, and paid the money in advance. I’m afraid that I didn’t use my own name—and I did use a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles and murmured something about being here from Virginia on business with the International Teachers’ Association, and what a lovely place Washington was in the spring. You see, you don’t have to have a driver’s license in Virginia, and I was afraid that they might want me to show one.” She smiled wanly at the memory, and Sheridan caught himself forgetting everything else and wondering whether even horn-rimmed spectacles could make her look like an International Teacher. “I thought that if I couldn’t find some way of getting around this town without having half of the reporters in America trotting along at my heels I’d literally go mad. And now with a judicious use of back doors and Washington’s engaging habit of using its streets as all-year-round open-air garages I’m practically a free woman again. It’s sitting around the corner this very minute looking as small and dark blue and harmless as nine tenths of the cars in Washington, thank goodness. So you see that I can get home perfectly by myself.… What were those other questions that could wait till tomorrow, K? … Perhaps I could answer them now.”

“There is no need for you to answer them, either now or tomorrow,” he told her gently. “If Dion prefers to say nothing—and that might be wisest—I can undoubtedly check with the airplane company and the steamer line on which Mr. Harrington sailed.”

“You mean about how he got to New York—how long it took, and that kind of thing? Oh, I can tell you that perfectly; he explained it all to me, because I couldn’t understand it either. He gave Fay—” She halted, looking around her with lost eyes, as though somewhere in the tranquil room she could find something to cling to that would bring her even a second of steadiness and comfort.… But after a moment her eyes returned to the ruby ring, and she continued as quietly as though she were telling him an old, half-forgotten story: “He gave Fay the pick-me-up at a little before twelve, but he didn’t get out of the house until after twelve-thirty; there were quite a lot of things to do, and he spent almost ten minutes looking for the note—he knew that that stamp would be dangerous if it and the red glass ever fell into the hands of the police. It was actually down under the cushions behind Fay’s back in that horrible book that she was reading—and the red glass was stuck into the compact in her bag. We mightn’t ever have found it if it hadn’t fallen onto the floor. K, doesn’t it seem incredible that what really ruined him was a little piece of red paper and a stick of green stone no bigger than a match—and me?”

“You, Tess?”

“Yes—oh, yes. Don’t you see, if I hadn’t given you that note with the red stamp and my own box of backgammon markers, you mightn’t ever have thought again about its being Dion?” She wrung her hands together desperately, not moving her eyes from them. “I thought that the note would prove how innocent—how innocent and friendly their relations were—and how he wasn’t planning to see her until today; and I thought that if I gave you the backgammon markers that matched the one you’d found, you’d stop thinking about what had happened to the ones that you couldn’t find. Only I forgot to take out that extra one that shouldn’t have been there at all—the one that wouldn’t fit in and that made fifty-one instead of fifty. How could I have forgotten? How could I? … If the one you found had fitted in, you wouldn’t have counted them, would you? And if you hadn’t counted them—” She lifted her head and looked straight at him, saying in a small voice, terrifying in its remoteness, “I really—I really murdered him then, didn’t I? As much as he murdered Fay.… Dion.… And all that I wanted in the world was to save him.”

Sheridan said, in a voice almost as remote as hers:

“No, no—you are quite wrong, believe me. It was he who was unable to find the note, you remember—and he who was so careless as to leave the marker behind.… And you must believe me again when I tell you that without either, I would have found out that it was Mallory. A little sooner or a little later, perhaps—but in the end it would have come to the same thing. You must have confidence enough in me to believe that, Tess, for both our sakes.”

She whispered:

“For both our sakes—I’d forgotten how kind you were, K—I’ll try to believe it.… Well, when he got back here, he still had to hurry; he had to change his clothes, and he found an old Burberry of Jerry’s in the closet that had a black band on one sleeve—Jerry wore it after his uncle died last fall. He took some glasses of his own, too, that he’d had to wear when he had trouble with his eyes a year or so ago. It was all a simply hideous rush, because in order to make that alibi absolutely unshakable, he had to be in New York in between five to six hours after he left the Temples’, which, if he’d done what he was pretending to do, would have just barely given him time to collect the attaché case, change into day clothes here, and break every record for slightly decrepit cars getting to New York. If he had left this house at eleven-thirty, and made the trip in, say, five hours and a half, he’d have arrived at the docks at about five o’clock Standard time—and that wouldn’t have left even ten minutes to spare for a murder that must have taken at the very least an hour to carry out. What he actually did, of course, was to get away from here a little after one, and, as it turned out, he made such good time by plane and the taxi between Hasbrouck Heights and New York that he had to kill almost half an hour, before he finally went on the boat at five, to make the automobile proposition seem even possible. He actually arrived there at about half-past four, you see, and he didn’t send the telegram until after he’d seen old Harrington and delivered the papers—that’s why it was stamped six twenty-five daylight-saving time.… If no one had thought of airplanes, it really would have been one of those impregnable alibis, wouldn’t it? And he hoped he’d managed even that part by using Crawford Field at Baltimore and the little field near Hasbrouck Heights instead of Washington and Newark. Afterwards he did realize that the old gentleman with the accent and the limp and the glasses was almost too good to be true—but then it was too late.”

“As you say, too late.… Will you give me once more your hands, Tess?”

She held them out to him, unquestioningly as a child, and he held them as carefully and as gently as though he realized that it was to a child that they belonged.

“So cold!” he said. “Too cold, my poor Tess.… Mallory came to you Sunday afternoon, was it not? Did he return to Baltimore-by plane to get his car?”

“No. He took a train—rather a slow one, so that there wouldn’t be any chance of his meeting anyone that he knew. He got his car out of the garage where he’d parked it the night before, and drove over to Stillhaven to try to see Jerry—and when he found that he couldn’t, he came back to Washington—he came back to me.”

“And did you tell him then that you knew that it was he who had killed Fay? Or did he, perhaps, tell you?”

“No.” The hands that were already as cold as ice seemed suddenly colder still. “I thought then that maybe I wouldn’t ever have to tell him—that maybe if I gave you the note and the backgammon markers, they would absolutely clear him.… I was a fool, of course. If I’d told him then, he’d have warned me about the note and the glass—and I might have saved him. But I was afraid. I was afraid that if we ever—we ever even whispered it under our breaths to each other, it would be a sword between us forever.”

“When was it, then, that you told him?”

“I didn’t. He told me.… Tonight, after he heard you get that message from the field.… Sometime between six and seven, wasn’t it? Just after you’d both had the sherry, and he was supposed to be dressing for dinner. He came straight to me because he simply had to find out if you had the note with the red stamp. And I had to tell him that I’d given it to you. He only stayed about twenty minutes—but he wasn’t angry with me at all, K.” Her voice broke for the first time, and she added proudly, in spite of that quaver, “It was me that he was sorry for all the time—it was me that he wanted not to be hurt. If you knew Dion, you’d understand.” She sighed suddenly—a long, exhausted sigh—and leaning her head back against the cushions of the couch, she murmured, “You can’t imagine all the plans that he had—all the ways, even in twenty minutes, that he had to prove to me that everything was going to turn out all right.”

“What kind of plans were those, Tess?”

“Oh—” She moved the bright head restlessly, and her lips curved for a moment, hunting for a lost smile. “The kind of plans that a little boy might make who’d been reading Treasure Island. If he was convinced this evening that you definitely suspected him, he was going to clear out as soon as you’d gone to bed—get over the Mexican border some way, and work his way down to Costa Rica, where he’d suddenly appear with a beard and forged passports, and acquire a coffee plantation near San José and settle down as an Australian gentleman of distinguished but obscure background, to wait till I came to join him.”

“You, Tess?”

“Yes. I was to arrange to go on a cruise next winter, and simply disappear—preferably in the vicinity of Port Limon—and with the family reputation for suicide, the entire world would leap to the conclusion that I’d simply jumped over the nearest deck rail. Of course what I was actually supposed to do, by Dion, was to dye my hair jet black and join my supposed Australian husband in the uplands of Costa Rica.… And we were to live happy ever after.”

“He was leaving no excuse for his flight behind him? It was to be taken by his colleagues and Washington in general as admission of guilt, pure and simple?”

“Oh, he wasn’t admitting any guilt at all! He was leaving a neatly constructed letter for me, with a postage stamp on it and everything, that I could turn over to the police—saying that he simply couldn’t face life any longer, that I knew what Fay’s death had meant to him, and that this seemed to him the only way out, and that even if it appeared cowardly, he was taking it.… It didn’t actually say that he was committing suicide, but I think that it would have satisfied even you that he intended to.”

“Why are you so sure of that, Tess?”

“I ought to be sure. I dictated it so that it should sound exactly like that.”

“When? Early this evening? At your house?”

“No—no. If I’d done it there, it wouldn’t have had the right paper—or the right ink. You’ve taught me quite a lot about notes, K—if it comes to that, you’ve taught me quite a lot about how a well-staged suicide should look. Dion wrote the note only an hour or so ago—with his own fountain pen, on his own paper.… Don’t you think that I ought to be going now?”

“Did you let Dion think at first that you agreed with those plans of his?”

“I don’t know what he thought—except that he loved me, and that I loved him.”

“Why were you trying so desperately to reach him at Joan Lindsay’s tonight?”

“Because I was desperate.” She sat quite still, making no effort to release the cold, quiet hands that he held in his, but he felt, somehow, that she had left him a long time ago. “Nell Tappan called up to say that tomorrow she would give me back Fay’s backgammon markers that she’d won from her, if I wanted them, but that she was taking them tonight to Joan’s, as she’d asked her to bring some extra ones. And I knew then—I knew then that everything was over. Even if you hadn’t found out yet how to read the writing on the stamps. I knew that you would see those markers and learn that they were Fay’s. And I was afraid that Dion might see them, too, and lose his head. I had to see him; I had to see him quickly.”

“You wanted to make him realize that those plans of his were quite impossible? That you would have no part in them?”

“I wanted to make him realize it—yes—but I couldn’t tell him. How could I tell him, K, that I couldn’t bear life chained to a fugitive and a derelict? That even if I could bear it for myself, I couldn’t bear it for him.… I couldn’t tell him that—ever.”

“Still, you think that in the end you made him see it?”

“In the end, yes—in the end, I do think that I made him see it.… Even though we did drink our Happy Landings toast to Costa Rica.”

“Happy Landings? That is the Royal Flying Corps toast, is it not?”

“Yes—that’s what it really is, of course.” She smiled at him faintly, but he knew that the eyes fixed so gravely and docilely on his did not see him at all. “But with us it’s just a childish trick that we’ve gone through every time we’ve had a party together since we really got to know each other this spring. We drink to the next time and place that we’re going to meet—that way it makes it seem safer and surer, somehow. And tonight, because it seemed to us a specially important night, we drank it in champagne.… I’d just finished drying and putting away my glass in the kitchenette when you came in … so that no one would know that I had been here. Dion agreed when I came that that was a very good idea.”

“I had thought,” he said, “that I came in very quietly.”

“Oh, but you did,” she assured him consolingly. “It was just that I was rather expecting you. If I hadn’t been, I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t have heard you at all.”

“There was one thing that struck me as somewhat extraordinary when I came in,” he said slowly, his hands closing a little more strongly on hers. “There was a light in the closet out there—in Hardy’s closet, where he kept his chemicals. I went in because I thought that there might be someone inside, but it was empty. Only I found that one of the chemicals that Mallory had told me that he had seen there only quite recently was gone. A small tin can of cyanide of potassium.… Do you know what cyanide of potassium is, Tess?”

“Do you mean do I know that it’s practically the same thing as prussic acid, and that it’s a deadly poison? Oh, yes—I know that.”

“Tess, do you think that it is possible that Mallory took that can of cyanide?”

“I know that he did. I asked him to get it, just a few minutes before you came, while I was fixing the champagne cocktails.”

“But, Tess, in God’s name why?”

“I told him that I thought that it would look even more as though he were going to commit suicide if he left it standing by the letter to me,” she explained gravely. “Open, you know, with just a little sprinkle of it on the desk, as though he were taking some with him. He thought that was a good idea, too.… Can I go now, K? It’s really getting dreadfully late.”

He felt his own hands turn colder than hers as he slowly released them and rose, standing aside to let her pass. He could feel the chill penetrating deeper—down through his flesh, down through his bone—as he followed the bright foam of the silvery train sweeping just ahead of him around the curves of the stairs. On the desk, she had said—open on the desk.… The silver cloak on his arm was heavy as lead.

At the foot of the stairs she stood waiting, gracious and submissive, while he folded it about her, and then turned towards him, holding out both her hands with that valiant and heartbreaking smile.

“It’s good-night again, isn’t it, K? Or is it good-morning? It must be long after one, isn’t it?”

“Long after,” he said mechanically, letting her hands drop almost before he touched them. “Tess, you may think me the worst of fools, but that tin of cyanide—that tin of cyanide open on his desk—that I do not like to think of. Even though it may disturb him, I think that I will knock on Mallory’s door and ask him to give me that tin.”

She said, her hands already on the knob of the street door:

“Don’t knock. He won’t hear you.”

Sheridan stood rigid, staring at the dark paneled door on which he was not to knock.

“He has gone, then? After all you said, he is gone?”

“No. I told you—he’s in there. He’s dead, K.”

Her voice was as steady as her eyes, but Sheridan stretched out his hand and held fast to the newel post.

“So that, Tess, is what you have been trying to tell me since you came up those stairs. That Mallory is dead—that he has killed himself?”

She said:

“No—no. I’ve been trying to tell you that I killed him.… Only you wouldn’t listen.”

He whispered, not moving:

“I do not believe you. You are mad.”

“I don’t believe myself—quite,” Tess Stuart told him gently. “But it is true that I put the powder in his glass—quite a lot of it, so that it would be really sure and quick. I asked him to get my cloak from the hall, and when he came back it was all done. But, K, what I said was true—I do think in the end he understood—I do think so.”

“Understood?” He fought to find his voice, as sometimes he had fought to find it in a nightmare. “What was there that he understood? That you were a murderess?”

“K, hasn’t prussic acid got a very strong taste? A taste like bitter almonds?”

“You seem well acquainted with all its properties,” he said.

“You couldn’t ever disguise it just in a champagne cocktail, could you?”

“No. As you say, not ever.”

“Well, but then, don’t you see? I didn’t try to disguise it. I just put it there, and he touched his lips to it and said, ‘Happy Landings—in Costa Rica!’ And then he stood looking down into it as though—as though he saw something, and after a minute he lifted up the glass, and smiled straight at me, and said, ‘You’re braver than I am, aren’t you, darling? Still—Happy Landings!’ And he drank it down quite slowly, every drop of it, with his eyes still on me. He needn’t have drunk it, need he, K? He needn’t have drunk it unless he’d understood?”

Sheridan lifted one hand to his eyes to shut out for a moment that white and shining face, terrible and beautiful in its fearless triumph.

And it was the voice of the man in the nightmare that he heard crying to her.

“Yes, that surely he must have understood. Thank God, then, Tess—thank God that you never really loved him.”

He heard her own voice saying, touched with wonder:

“Not love him? Oh, darling, but it’s you who didn’t understand.… He’s the only man that I’ve ever loved—he’s the only man that I’ll ever love in my life.”

He could feel the cool rush of air from the street, and the sound of the door closing behind her as quietly as though it were not his own life that it had closed on.

When he dropped his hand, the hall was empty; only the echo of her voice still haunted it—that deep young voice, clear and gallant as a child’s, even the echo of which was to make every other one that he ever heard again unreal as a dream.…

THE END