“I’ve sent Hilda off,” she said. “I want you to do something, Pat. Get me the list you made the other day of the stuff in the safe. I want to look it over.”

I got it and she sat there looking it over. It was all recorded: the two pearl ropes, the emeralds, a half dozen diamond bracelets, and the big square-cut engagement ring she seldom wore. In addition there were brooches, earrings, clips, and a long diamond chain. It looked like the riches of the Indies to me, but she eyed it with dissatisfaction, trying to remember the cost of each piece and even to estimate its resale value.

“It’s not a great deal,” she said. “Still, with care, it might be enough. It’s something, anyhow.”

I was puzzled. Although I kept only her private checkbook, I could not imagine any necessity for selling her jewels. She did not explain, however. She kept the list, lying back among her pillows and looking tired but content.

“I feel happier than I have for a long time,” she said. “Good night, my dear, and sleep well.”

They were the last words she ever spoke to me.

Bessie’s party was going strong when I went back to my room at ten o’clock. I undressed and got into bed, still puzzled. Then I thought I had hit on the solution; that she was buying Bessie off once more, paying what she had once called her price for peace.

It made me furious. Only a day or two before I had handed Bessie a bill for two thousand dollars for clothes and she had merely laughed at me.

“What am I to do with it?”

“Do with it? Give it to Tony. I’m still married to him.”

She looked amused when she saw my face. “Give it to him, with my love,” she added. “It’s chicken feed to him, and to hell with it.”

Now Maud was buying her off again. I am afraid I saw red that night, with the noise below, the incessant movement of the men carrying drinks, and the occasional bursts of laughter. For whatever Tony had, he had earned it. Long before that he had told me about it.

Old J.C., he said, had put him to work as soon as he left college. “He put me in the mill,” he told me. “All he told me was to buy some overalls and to spit on anything before I sat down on it. I forgot one day, and I burned more than the seat of my pants. But when I left, at the end of three years, I had calluses an inch thick on my hands, and I knew the business, from start to finish.”

He had liked the mill. He had even carried a lunchbox. He got to know the men, and liked them too.

“The old man had done his best by them, according to his lights; did away with the company store, built bathrooms for them and laundries for their wives. He didn’t understand it, but they didn’t want benevolence. They get a share of the profits now. It’s not much, but it helps.”