That night, undressing in her rather chilly bedroom, with a single light burning, Monica caught sight of her wavering image in the bureau mirror and wondered that it was so altered. Her fading “golden” hair now looked bleached of all color; her eyes were unnaturally bright; her face was flushed, animated—as beautiful as it had ever been. And there was no one to see.

Her color was so high, she supposed, her eyes so glittering, because she was still trembling with rage. She wanted to telephone Sheila to warn her—she wanted to protect her, commiserate with her—how she hated such people, such petty smirking envious people!—Farley with his smug bulldog face and British drawl—Farley who had seemed for the first time in their acquaintance an enemy of hers, of hers and Sheila’s—

She lay in bed, sleepless, wretched, hearing again the prattle at the dinner table, hearing Farley’s mocking voice and her own thin cold reply. Had she betrayed Sheila, she wondered, by speaking so calmly?—so without passion? Without telling them how contemptible they all were—how irremediably shallow—set beside a woman like Sheila Trask?

She found herself stroking the invisible scar. For comfort, perhaps. For angry solace. It seemed to leap to her fingertips, pulsing warmly, hotly, stitched like memory into her flesh, a delicious secret. Though it was, she remembered, no longer a secret, strictly speaking.

2

And suddenly, in the first week of December, there was a mystery—a minor mystery—puzzling rather than frightening—in her life: someone had been “making inquiries” about her in Glenkill. A man of no particular age, no distinctive features, soft-voiced, unemphatic, discreet in his questions and even more discreet in giving explanations of his own. The drugstore, the grocery store, the variety store, even the real estate agency—even the Glenkill Academy!—he’d managed to visit them all, asking for information about Miss Monica Jensen.

“But what sort of questions did he ask?” Monica demanded. “—Who could it have been? What did he look like? What did you tell him?”

On all sides Monica was assured, perhaps too vigorously, that of course the man had been told nothing.

Dazed, sickened, Monica had a vision of her former husband in a state of breakdown, turned suddenly against her; spying on her; hoping to ruin her new life. It was unbelievable, but who else cared enough about her to visit Glenkill . . . ? To question people about her? Yet Harold had seemed to feel little emotion for her, just as, at the end, she felt such little emotion for him. Their last telephone exchange, months ago, had been brief, perfunctory, even hurried; not at all embittered. “Good-bye,” Harold had said, and Monica had said, “Good-bye,” and that was that—eight years put to rest.