“I must admit, it was rather a shock. But then I wasn’t paying attention, as I should have been. My mind was elsewhere.”

“Elsewhere, was it? I can’t imagine where.”

He shrugged his shoulders and opened his mouth to admit more cake.

“You know,” I said, “I can’t help thinking I’m to blame.”

“You? How so?”

“Because there was another ending to that evening, don’t you remember? It might have ended much more pleasantly for both of us.”

He set down the plate and rested his forearms on his knees, which brought his head closer to mine. Between us, the crumbs of cake, the glasses of tea.

“Fault requires intent, Mrs. Randolph,” he said. “And you surely had no inkling that a man lay in wait for me at the docks with a billy club in his hand.”

“A billy club!”

“Yes.”

“It’s too terrible. You can’t imagine how awful I feel about it. Thank God you’re alive.”

“Life is made up of these little crossroads, after all,” he said. “A million daily forks in the road.”

I studied his eyes behind the sheen of his spectacles. I thought there was something different about him—well, of course there was—some shedding of the boyish radiance that had surrounded him last December. That half-bashful exuberance. As I watched, he put his hands on the arms of the chair to lever himself upward. A wedge of sunshine passed across his face. Instead of reaching for his cane, he limped his way to the window on his own. He shoved one hand into his trouser pocket and braced the other one on the top of the window frame, while he squinted through the glass at the street outside.

“Keeping an eye on the riot?” I said.

“The riot is largely over, it seems. Good old Sir Leslie spoke to the ringleaders over at Government House and promised to look into things. Then the police sent everybody back over the hill.”

“Really? That’s all?”

“Not quite. I don’t doubt there’ll be trouble tonight. But the point is to keep the trouble where it belongs, at least so far as the police are concerned.”

“Naturally. I’m sure they’ll be talking about nothing else at the Red Cross tomorrow. The iniquity of the coloreds, how they should be grateful to have jobs at all, how it’s just what you’d expect from a Negro to smash up the property others have worked so hard to build.”

Thorpe turned his head from the window. “Do I detect a certain bitterness, Mrs. Randolph? A certain radical tenor to your thoughts?”

“I’m no radical. I just happen to think the Bay Street crowd is a pack of bigots, that’s all. And the labor situation is plain unfair.”

“And that’s why you wandered into town today?”

“I wandered into town today because it’s a story, and I’m a journalist.”