“She said, ‘Pat, listen, did you get my note?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She asked, ‘Are you coming?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that I can make it.’ She said, ‘Of course you can make it. We can’t talk here. It doesn’t take ten minutes to get to the cottage. You’ve got to make it.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll be there. Look out; someone’s coming.’ They both of them turned around, and I could hear him calling to someone in the hall to come in and look at the ship.
“I stood there, leaning my head against the side of the house and feeling icy cold and deathly—deathly sick. It was as though I had heard Dan calling to me across thirty years.
“From that moment until this one I have never known one happy hour, one happy moment, one happy second. I spent my life spying on him—on my Pat—trying to discover how far he had gone, how far he was prepared to go. I never caught them together again, in spite of the fact that I fairly haunted the terrace under the study window, thinking that some afternoon or evening they might return. They never did. Mimi didn’t come very often to the house, as a matter of fact.
“But on the evening of the , at a little after half-past six, someone did come to the study window, who gave me the clue that I had been seeking so long. It was Melanie Cordier, of course. I was just coming back from the garden, where I had been tying up some climbing roses, when I saw her there by the corner near the bookcase. She had a book in her hands—quite a large, thick book in a light tan cover, and she was looking back over her shoulder with a queer, furtive look while she put something in it. She shoved it back onto the shelf and was starting toward the hall, when she drew back suddenly and stood very quiet. I thought: ‘There is someone in the hall. When Melanie goes out it will mean that the coast is clear.’
“It wasn’t more than a minute later that she left, and I started around to the front of the house to get to the study and see what she had put in that book. I was hurrying so that I almost ran into Elliot Farwell, who was coming down the front steps and not looking any more where he was going than if he had been stone blind. He said, ‘Beg pardon’ and brushed by me without even lowering his eyes to see who it was, and I went on across the hall into the study, thinking that never in my life had I seen a man look so wretchedly and recklessly unhappy.
“No one was in the hall; they were all in the living room, and I could hear them all laughing and talking—and I decided that if I were to find what Melanie had put in the book I’d better do it quickly, as the party might break up at any minute. I had noticed just where the book was—on the third shelf close to the wall—but there were three volumes just alike, and that halted me for a minute.
“The note was in the second volume that I opened. It was addressed to ‘Mr. Patrick Ives. Urgent—Very Urgent.’ I stood looking at that ‘Urgent—Very Urgent’ for a minute, and then I put it in the straw bag that I carry for gardening and went out through the dining room to the pantry to get myself a drink of water, because I felt a little faint.
“No one was in the pantry. I let the water run for a minute so that it would get cold, and then I drank three glasses of it, quite slowly, until my hand stopped shaking and that queer dizzy feeling went away. Then I started back for the hall. I got as far as the dining room, when I saw Pat standing by the desk in the corner.
“There’s a screen between the dining-room door and the study, but it doesn’t quite cut off the bit near the study window. I could see him perfectly clearly. He had quite a thick little pile of white papers in his hand, and he was counting them. They were long, narrow papers, folded just like the bond that he’d given me for Christmas, a year ago—just exactly like it. And while I was standing there staring at them, Sue called to him from the hall to come out on the porch and see his guests off, and he gave a little start and shoved the papers into the left-hand drawer and went out toward the hall.
“I gave him a few seconds to get to the porch, before I crossed through the study. I was terrified that if he came back and found me there he’d know I had the note and accuse me of it—and I knew that when he did that all the life that I’d died twenty lives to build for us would crumble to pieces at the first word he spoke. I couldn’t bear to have Pat know that I suspected how base he was—that I knew that he was Dan all over again—a baser, viler Dan, since Dan had only had me to keep him straight, and Pat had Sue. I felt strong enough and desperate enough to face almost anything in the world except that Pat should know that I had found him out. So I went through the study and the hall and up the stairs to my room in the left wing without one backward look.
“Once in my room, I locked the door and bolted it—and pushed a chair against it, too, to make assurance triply sure. That’s the only thing that I did that entire evening that makes me think I must have been a little mad. Still,
