Now and then I saw Hopper prowling about, and Bessie was still with us, locking herself in her rooms, talking now and then of Palm Beach or Nassau but making no move to go.

“That tart,” Amy would say. “Just keep her away from me, or some day I’ll knock that nose of hers so flat she’ll have to smell with her ears.”

Then one day something happened to Bessie, and we knew our troubles were not yet over.

She had been buying clothes lavishly, and that day she went to the city to be fitted. She drove her own car, but at seven o’clock that night she had not come back. Gus came up from the garage to tell me about it.

“She doesn’t like being out after dark,” he said. “I wondered if I’d better go and look for her. She may have had trouble. She’s a fast driver.”

He avoided my eyes. Both of us knew that Bessie had been drinking considerably during the past few weeks, and I thought rapidly. Tony was not back from town, and I did not want to worry Maud.

“I’ll go with you, Gus,” I said. “Wait until I get a coat.”

He brought the station wagon around, and five minutes later we were on the road to the city. It was almost deserted, the people who preferred it to the railroad having already passed. At that, we almost missed her. Gus’s eyes were good, however. Suddenly he stopped and backed up. There was a car about fifty feet off the road, jammed against a tree.

We got out and ran to it. It was not a pretty sight. Bessie was bent over the wheel unconscious, and the car was a total wreck. Together Gus and I got her into the station wagon, and I held her as best I could on the way back. She was partially conscious some time before we reached the Cloisters. She opened her eyes and looked up at me.

“Somebody shot me,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

I got Gus’s flashlight and looked her over. There was no blood on her that I could see. She’d given her forehead a terrific bump against the windshield, and she moaned that it hurt her to breathe. She refused to be taken to the hospital, however. We took her back to the Cloisters and called the men to carry her in. Not until then did I see she was still clutching her small revolver.

Chapter Twenty

IT WAS AMY WHO told me her condition that night, an Amy reluctantly pressed into service but once more the nurse. Bessie had a slight concussion and several broken ribs, “and I guess that will hold her for a while.” But she was frankly incredulous as to Bessie’s insistence that somebody had shot at her.

“I don’t believe her,” she said. “She’s smashed her car and she’ll want a new one. Not,” she added judicially, “that plenty of people wouldn’t like to shoot her. I couldn’t be trusted with a gun myself.”