“Suffered!” he said. “Oh, my God!”

Nevertheless, he went with me. Someone had turned on the floodlight. He held tight to my arm, and I knew he was crying, the long dry sobs of a man facing more than he can endure. He never spoke at all until we reached the door. Then he turned and looked back. “Leaving her there!” he said thickly. “Leaving her on that floor, Pat. I can’t do it.”

He tried to turn back, but somehow I got him into the library. He stumbled like a drunken man, and I told Reynolds, who had followed us, to get some hot coffee and brandy. Tony sat down, his face colorless. “Sorry, Pat,” he said. “Just stick by me. I still can’t believe it. It was her heart, wasn’t it?”

“It must have been. Just remember this, Tony. It must have been quick and easy. She didn’t have any pain.”

And all at once I was back at Lydia’s years earlier, and Lydia was saying something like that to me. “No pain, no anything, Pat. Such a wonderful way to go.” Now I repeated that. “No pain, no anything Tony. Such a wonderful way to go.”

It is strange to remember that, to realize that neither one of us knew then how she had died. If we noticed the blood—there was not much—perhaps we laid it to her fall; and there was that heavy hair of hers, loose from its pins and spread on the tiling. I doubt if even Jim saw it at first. When he did, his first thought was that she had fallen and cut her head. Then he lifted her hair, and what he saw made him stiffen.

He did not say anything. There was I, still unconscious by the door, and Tony was on his knees beside her, trying to call her back to life. He let the hair fall again. But he glanced into the pool, and there was the revolver, as if it had fallen from her dead hand. That was when he barred everybody but Tony and the two patrolmen from the place.

Back in the house, aside from my grief I was having troubles of my own. Bessie, wakened by the coming and going of cars, had heard the news and for some reason gone into shrieking hysterics. After Maud’s body had been laid in her big bed and Tony was shut in his room, Nora asked me to see her.

It must have been seven o’clock in the morning by that time, a cold gray October day. I was still in a house coat, still stunned. But the sight of Bessie roused me. She was fully dressed, and a packed suitcase lay on her bed.

“I’m going,” she said feverishly. “Don’t try to stop me. I’m getting out.”

“You can’t do that. Not now,” I told her. “Anyhow, why should you go?”

“Why? Because I don’t want to be the next. That’s why enough, isn’t it?”

“Listen to me, Bessie,” I said. “She died of a heart attack. She wasn’t killed.”