I have often wondered if any courtship was ever carried on with as little love-making as Tony’s and mine. But he was more like himself too. The first shock of his mother’s death had passed. He would come in, big and brisk from the cold air outside, hand Miss Mattie a huge box of candy, and then standing off would survey me critically.

“Well how’s the S.B. tonight?”

“S.B.? It doesn’t sound nice, Tony.”

“That’s because you have a low mind, Miss Abbott. S.B. stands for string bean, and that’s what you look like.”

He seldom mentioned Bessie. One night he did, however. He was sitting by the cannel coal fire in Miss Mattie’s Victorian living room while I was curled up on the hearthrug.

“Were you very much in love with her, Tony?” I asked. “When you married her?”

“I was crazy about her. It lasted three months. Let’s forget it, darling. It’s over.”

But I did not see him often. He was frightfully busy. When he came home at night it was with a briefcase of papers, and often with Dwight Elliott or now and then a mill superintendent. I gathered, too, that the Wainwrights, heading the minority stockholders, were still making trouble. One night he even went to sleep in the chair by the fire. I saw then that he was close to exhaustion. There is something helpless in a man asleep, and I suppose all women with a scrap of maternal instinct yearn over them at such times. Certainly I did my bit of yearning that night, doing it with might and main until Miss Mattie, hearing a suspicious silence, appeared in the doorway and roused him.

The interval of normality did not last long. I had dined with Lydia one night and stayed rather late. Maud’s death was still a mystery. Julian in his cell was awaiting trial, the search for Evans or his body was continuing, on the theory of the prosecution that he had seen Don murdered and—dead or alive—might help their case. We talked until almost midnight, when Bill Sterling took me home; and I was taking off my dinner dress when the telephone rang. It was Bessie, and she sounded unlike herself.

“I’ve got an attack of jitters,” she said. “Don’t ask me why. I’m plain scared. That’s all there is to it.”

“Has anything happened?”

“Not yet. Would you mind coming up? I know it’s silly, but I’m alone here. Tony’s staying in town, and O’Brien says he saw somebody in the grounds.”

I told her I would come. It was a cold night, and it took some time to start the car. It was long after twelve when I started, with Jim’s automatic on the seat beside me and a chilly sort of apprehension making goose pimples all over me. When I turned in at the drive I picked up the gun, but I reached the house undisturbed. O’Brien let me in, grinning.

“Nothing to worry about, miss,” he said. “Maybe some of the help slipping out, that’s all. But I told Mrs. Wainwright and she’s having a fit all over the place.”