The Unsuspected

the press. Then she cried out, 'Howard!'

He didn't look around, though he moved his head a trifle warily,

'That was funny!' Mathilda said. 'There was one man who seemed to think— He said my husband— Why, that's what he called me! Mrs. Howard!'

'He did?' said Mr. Howard, in a bored, perfunctory way.

And he said no more. Mathilda stopped talking. Really, he was the limit. Certainly it was an odd thing to have been said and the coincidence was very odd. 'Your husband is waiting for you, Mrs Howard.' Any normal human being, thought Mathilda indignantly

would want to know all about it, especially when it was the same name. He wouldn't just sit, looking indifferently away, out of the window.

The cab pulled up. A doorman helped them out, a bellhop came for her suitcase. She knew the place. Francis guided her into the lobby, into the elevator. Mathilda stood stiff and cold. The funny thing was that just as they walked into the elevator, as he gave the

floor number to the boy, she caught a flash of his eye on her, and it was a look of both impatience and anger. Mathilda bit hard on her teeth. He had no business being angry with her, for the love of Mike! She marched down the corridor after the bellboy, holding

her head haughtily.

They were admitted to a suite. Mathilda stood in the middle of the floor. She indicated the telephone. Francis was muttering to the bellboy about trains, bags. Without a word to her, he crossed to the telephone and asked for Grandy s number. He sat hunched over the phone, his right arm dangling. The call went through without much delay.

'Hello. . . . Jane?'

Mathilda thought, Now, who is Jane? It seemed to her that he'd mentioned a Jane before.

'Francis,' said Francis. . . . 'Yes, she's here.' He looked around at Mathilda coldly, as if to say, 'What, are you listening to a private conversation?' He said, as if he were speaking in code, 'Is everybody well?' Then he said, with a hint of desperation, 'Jane, can you get out? And I mean now?'

'Why, no,' said Jane cheerfully from Connecticut, 'of course not. He's right here, Mr. Howard. Here he is!'

Grandy's voice took her place. 'My dear boy, is she really with you?'

'She's here,' he said again, this time with a very odd inflection. He held out the phone to Mathilda. She took it, surprised, touched, excited, and suddenly ready to weep again.

'Oh, Grandy, darling!'

'Mathilda, little duck, are you all right? You're back? You're safe?'

'I'm fine,' she quavered. 'Oh, Grandy, I want to see you.'

'Don't cry,' said Grandy. 'Don't cry. God bless us every one. What a darling you are to telephone. Are you happy?'

'Oh, Grandy!'

'Tell Francis to bring you home.'

'I will, I will. I'm coming just as fast—'

'Strawberries and cream, Tyl,' said Grandy. 'You hurry, sweetheart.'

He hung up and she hung up, sobbing. Strawberries and cream was her special treat. How like him! How dear!

Mr. Howard was standing with his hands in his pockets, staring out the window.

'Grandy says you're to bring me home.' She was willing to smile at him now.

He turned around. She thought, with a shock, Somethings hurt him. He's going to cry.

He said in a low, vibrant voice that startled her with its passionate appeal, 'Tyl, don't you remember?'

Chapter Five

'Remember what?'

He started to pull his hands out of his pockets and then thrust them deeper instead. 'Never mind. Foolish question. Obviously, you don't. You can't or you—' He came one step nearer. 'Tyl, what happened to you? Were you hurt, darling? You must have been . . .

ill for part of the time. That's so, isn't it?' Everything in his manner begged her to say yes.

'No,' said Mathilda. 'That isn't so.'

'But it must be so, and you've forgotten that too.'

'I haven't forgotten anything!' she cried. 'I wish you'd tell me! Who are you and what am I supposed to—'

'I'm your husband,' he said sharply, almost angrily.

She backed away a little. In her mind was a vague idea of mistaken identity. 'Are you sure you know who I am?' she asked gently. 'My name is Mathilda Frazier. I have no husband. I'm not married.'

He moved away from her, and with his hands still in his pockets, almost as if he didn't dare to take them out, he sat down on a straight chair, keeping his feet close together. He looked like a man controlling himself at some cost.

'Sorry,' he said. 'Let's try to straighten this out, shall we?'

He smiled. Mathilda moved to another chair and sat down it Her knees felt a little shaky. It was just as well to sit down.

'Yes, please ' she agreed.

They sat looking at each other.

'Do you remember' said Francis finally, in a quiet conversational tone, 'when you left Grandy's house, that Sunday afternoon last January, to come to New York?'

Mathilda nodded. She thought, But he knows Grandy. It can't be that he's mistaken me for someone else.

'You came to this hotel,' he was saying. 'Do you remember that?'

'Yes ' said Mathilda. 'Yes, of course I did. Not this room.'

'You were in Seven-o-five,' he stated. The number seemed right to her. She could not have recollected it, but she recognized it. 'You had some supper sent up,' he went on. She nodded. 'But a little later, about nine o'clock, you went down to the lobby.'

'No ' said Mathilda bluntly. Not at all. It was not so. She had crawled into bed to read. She hadn't been able to read or sleep either. She remembered getting up to look for aspirin, waiting for drowsiness that would not come, the desperate tricks she had tried to play on her own mind, the getting up at last to sit by the window holding her head.

'So that's where it begins,' the man was saying.

'Where what begins?'

'Your forgetting.'

'But I— What is it you say I've forgotten?'

'You came downstairs about nine o'clock,' he told her, 'that Sunday evening. You were pretty distressed; you were feeling pretty sick about Oliver.'

A thrill of dismay and excitement went through Mathilda. How did he know that?

'So you were restless and you came down to get something to read. It was a kind of excuse to get away from your room. You hated to go back. You drifted across the lobby toward the grillroom. That's when I saw you.'

Mathilda said, 'You couldn't have seen me. I didn't leave my room that Sunday night.'

'Please,' he begged. He closed his eyes. 'You made me think of flying,' he said in quite a different voice. 'You made me think of the sky or a bird. You're like a Winged Victory in modern dress, but with better ankles. You've got such a tearing beauty, Tyl—you're windblown. It's in your bones, your long, lovely legs, the way you walk, your face, your nose. The molding of the upper part of your cheek, around the outside of your eye. I've dreamed about it. And how that dear old soul, your Luther Grandison, can be so blind as to call you his ugly duckling and never see the swan! Why, Tyl, don't you know you make Althea look like a lump of paste?'

Mathilda heard what he said; she heard the words. But her mind went spinning off into confusion. How could he say such things? How could such things be said at all? She tightened her fingers around her purse. She felt a little dizzy. She was used to people

saying kind words about her looks. It was because she was so rich. She told herself that this, too, must be deliberate flattery, because she was so rich.

He opened his eyes, he smiled. His voice sank back as if it had begun to tire. 'Maybe I'd better make it plain right away. I fell in love with you, Mathilda, but you didn't fall in love with me. I knew that. I still know it. If you only had, maybe you wouldn't have for-

gotten.'

Mathilda took hold of herself. She dismissed the thought that someone must have gone mad. It wasn't helpful. She must think better than that. 'Why are you trying to make me believe something I know is not so?' she asked quietly. 'I do know, because I remember every minute of that time. There is nothing I've forgotten. I haven't been hurt or sick. I know exactly what happened to me in this hotel while I was here, and everything that has happened since. There is no gap.' She straightened her shoulders. 'I thought at first you might be honestly mistaken. You'd somehow or other got me mixed up with some other girl. But now I see you aren't mistaken, Mr. Howard. You're just lying. I'd like to know why.'

He shut his eyes to hide a brief gleam that baffled her. He groaned. He took his hands out of his pockets and held his head for a moment. Then his hands fell, relaxed and open, and he said, 'My poor Tyl. Don't—don't be upset.'

But Mathilda was thinking hard. 'What about Grandy?' she cried. 'Grandy knows you! Does Grandy think —'

'Yes,' he said. 'I've been—well, I've been staying there.'