“I went over to the chintz wing chair by the window and read the note. The chair was placed so that even in my room I could see the roses in the garden, and a little beyond the garden, the sandpile under the copper beech where the children played. They weren’t there now; I’d said good night to them outside just a minute or so before I finished tying up the roses. I read the note through three times.
“Of course, I completely misread it. I thought that what she was proposing was an elopement with Pat to California. It never once entered my head that she was referring to money that would enable Steve and herself to live a pleasanter life in a pleasanter place, and that her talk of hoodwinking Steve simply meant that she could conceal the source of the money from him.
“If I had realized that, I’d never have lifted my finger to prevent her getting it. I thought she wanted Pat. I’d have given her two hundred thousand dollars to go away and leave him alone. The most ghastly and ironical thing about this whole ironical and ghastly business is that if Mimi Bellamy hadn’t been as careless and slipshod with her use of the word ‘we,’ as she was with everything else in her life, she would be alive this day under blue skies.
“Of course it was stupid of me, too, and the first time that I read it I was bewildered by the lack of endearments in it. But there was all that about her hardly being able to wait, and how happy they would be; and the note was obviously hastily written—and I had always thought she had no depth of feeling. I suppose that all of us read into a letter much what we expect to find there, and what I expected to find was a twice-told tale. I expected to find that Pat was so mad about this girl that he was willing to wreck not only his own life for her but mine and Sue’s and Polly’s and Pete’s. And I couldn’t to save my soul think of a way to stop him.
“I was reading it for the third time when Melanie knocked at the door and announced dinner, and I put it back in my bag and pushed back the chair and unlocked the door and went down.
“When I heard Pat and Melanie and Sue all tell you that dinner was quite as usual that night, I wondered what strange stuff we weak mortals are made of. When I think what Sue was thinking and what Pat was thinking and what I was thinking, and that we could laugh and chat and breathe as usual—no, that doesn’t seem humanly possible. Yet that’s exactly what we did.
“Afterward, when they went into the study to look at the ship, I decided that I might just as well go into the rose garden and finish the work that I’d started out there. I’d noticed some dead wood on two of the plants, so I went to the flower room and got out the little knife that I kept with some other small tools in a drawer there. It’s a very good one for either budding or pruning, but I keep it carefully put away for fear that the children might cut their fingers. Then I went out to the garden.
“For a while I didn’t try to think at all: I just worked. I saw Miss Page coming back from the sandpile, and a minute or so later Sue came by, running toward the back gate. She called to me that she was going to the movies and that Pat was going to play poker. I was glad that they were not going to be there; that made it easier to think—and to breathe.
“As you know, she returned to the house. I don’t believe she was there more than five minutes before she came running by again and disappeared through the back gate. I sat down on the little bench at the end of the rose garden and tried to think.
“I was desperately anxious to keep my head and remain cool and collected, because one thing was perfectly clear. If something wasn’t done immediately, it would be too late to do anything. The question was what to do.
“I didn’t dare to go to Pat. At bottom, I must be a miserable coward; that was the simple, straightforward, and natural thing to do, and I simply didn’t dare to do it. Because I thought that he would refuse me, and that fact I couldn’t face. I was the person in all the world who should have had most trust in him, and I didn’t trust him at all. I remember that when I lie awake in the night. I didn’t trust him.
“I didn’t dare to go to Sue, either, because I was afraid that if she knew the truth—or what I was pleased to consider the truth—she would leave him, at any cost to Polly and Peter or herself. I knew that she was possessed of high pride and fine courage; I didn’t know that they would be chains to bind her to Pat. I didn’t trust her either.
“It wasn’t Pat and Sue and Mimi Bellamy that I was looking at, you see. It was Dan and I and the boardinghouse keeper’s Trudie.
“I sat on the bench in the rose garden and watched the sunlight turning into shadow and felt panic rising about me like a cold wind. I knew that Sue hadn’t a cent; her father had left her nothing at all, and she had refused to let Pat settle a cent on her, because she said that she loved to ask him for money.
“And I remembered … I remembered that Dan had taken nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot. I remembered that I had learned only a few weeks before
