By ten o’clock I had run out of cigarettes. I did not dare go down for any, or even for a book to read. I was too nervous to sit still. I paced the floor for the last hour, ready to bite my nails out of sheer desperation.

Once outside the house, however, it was better. I did not need my pocket flash. In the faint starlight the path was a thin yellow thread under the leafless trees. I carried the gun in my coat pocket, but nothing whatever occurred. The house at the Farm was dark, and Margery was in the sun room waiting. She opened the door and I slid in, to have her put her arms around me and hold to me as if I was her last hope on earth.

“I’m not crying,” she said. “I’m beyond tears, Pat.”

“Sit down. You’re shaking. What’s it all about, Margery?”

“It’s about my father. My stepfather, really. Pat, I don’t know what to do.”

“Your stepfather?” I said stupidly. “What about him? Who is he?”

“Evans,” she said. “Evan Evans. And I think he has lost his mind.”

I sat very still. I was too startled to speak. Was Evans our murderer, after all? Certainly Margery thought so. She sat there in the dark, huddled in a blanket from her bed, and told me, in a voice husky with strain.

“He hated Don,” she said. “After I ran away with him he said he would kill him if he ever saw him again.”

“But Maud? And now Bessie? You don’t know what you’re saying, Margery.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” she said obstinately. “He’s been queer ever since Don’s death. At first I thought it was because he believed Julian had killed him. But now—”

Evans, she said, had never forgiven Don for what he had done to her. Even when she came back, safely married to Julian, the resentment still held. He was still fond of her, however, and when she and Julian had tried to get him to leave the Cloisters he had refused. Julian had paid him a hundred and fifty dollars a month ever since. But he had not cared for money. He had put it in the bank for the girls.

“I wasn’t ashamed of him,” she said. “He had been good to me after Mother’s death, although I did not live at home. But to recognize him might have been to bring up the old story about Don and me. He was happy—in his own way—and comfortable, so we let him alone.”

He had liked the children. Now and then he saw them. They had no idea who he was, but he would buy small presents for them and hide them about the place. The little girls called them fairy gifts, and never knew where they came from.

“Then early in the summer he changed, Pat. I think he saw Don somewhere. He told me again that he would kill him if he showed up. He may even had talked to him. I don’t know. They knew each other. Father had gone to Don years ago when he learned I was seeing him. He threatened him at that time. That’s one reason we went abroad.”