“I was only eighteen when I met him,” she said, “but you know what he was. When he was younger he was any girl’s dream. I met him in Paris. He had a good position there, in the export office of one of the big American companies. Then, too, he’d been born here in the city. His family was all dead, but it was a sort of bond between us.”

She had been in France with an aunt, and the aunt had objected. “She thought he wanted my money. I had a good bit then. Besides, she thought he was too old for me. But—a girl of that age—” She sighed.

Anyhow, she had married him in London. Patou had made her dress, and Don had sent white orchids for her bouquet. She had been frightfully happy. But when business began to contract the foreign office was given up. Don was sent back to New York and then to his home city. He hadn’t wanted to return, but she was enchanted. They bought the house at Beverly, with her money, and Don commuted.

But he was gay. He liked going about. Then Audrey was born, and nothing was the same after that. “I was tied to the house and he wasn’t. He adored her, but—”

She looked down at her finger, where she had once worn a wedding ring.

“He was never faithful,” she said. “I knew that even then, but he would come home and be so remorseful that I forgave him. Perhaps if I had been harder to him—”

Her voice trailed off. She was busy with her own unhappy thoughts, and I was seeing Don riding out on his big horse on Sunday mornings. “Hello, Pat. How’s the jumping?”

“I fell off yesterday.”

“That’s the game, sweetheart. Don’t let it get you.”

The crowd on the river bank was still noisy when I left.

“Two bits they’ve got him!”

“Gimme the glasses, somebody. You lose, Larry. It looks like an old tire.”

Chapter Twenty-One

TONY DID NOT COME home that night at all, but I had plenty to think of. If Bessie had been Marguerite Weston, where did that leave him? Suppose the police learned it? It would give them a motive for the attack on Bessie, perhaps even for Don’s murder.

I slept badly, and early the next morning I went down to the public library on Main Street. Old Dan Reeves, who has been in charge there since my Elsie Dinsmore days, looked surprised when I asked for files of old city newspapers. At one o’clock I emerged, black with dust but no further along than I had been before. Fifteen years before there had been no scandal sheet in the city, and there was no mention of Donald Morgan’s elopement or of Marguerite Weston. Only a year or so later a brief announcement from Reno of Lydia’s divorce.

I called her and told her. She accepted it quietly.

“I suppose it was a foolish idea, anyhow,” she said. “Let’s forget it, Pat.”