“Not any more. There were times when I wanted to claw her eyes out.”

But he grows serious again. “I suppose Bessie talked,” he says. “She told him what she knew, or thought she knew. So she had to go.”

He lets it go at that, but I have to explain a number of things which he had been too busy or too distracted at the time to notice. The possibility of slipping down the basement stairs to the wine cellars under the ballroom, and taking the chain off the door. The probability that the Buddha had been taken some time before Bessie’s death and concealed outside. Even the reason why I hid in my room at the Cloisters that last night. That amuses him. He leans back and eyes me. We are in Miss Mattie’s parlor, with the manuscript on the table beside him. Near it are the blueprints of my old house. Tony keeps them at hand, for we are going to live there after we are married. The Cloisters is to be a summer home for poor children.

“I recognize the hazard in marrying you,” he says. “You shoot policemen, you fall down elevator shafts, and you get bopped on the head in cement pools. You jump bad fences on horses. You’re the jealous type. It sticks out all over you. And you wander around at night packing a gun! No wonder I tremble in terror. Look at me now. But at least,” he says, considering, “you do have a brain.”

“You said last night it resembled a scrambled egg.”

“Not an egg. Just scrambled, my darling. Which reminds me. Why don’t you go on and tell about some of the nice people in the story? That’s usual, isn’t it? Julian out of jail and so on.”

“I’m not writing a fairy tale,” I scoff, “with everybody living happily ever after. Nobody does that, Tony.”

“Well, we’re going to do our damnedest,” he says soberly. “I’ve learned a lot about living, Pat, and so have you.”

He has helped me with this story too. There has been so much talk that we both wanted it straightened out. And only a day or two ago he told me the details of the trap which was laid at the Cloisters. “We had about a dozen cops that night,” he said. “They scattered, and I went to the Cloisters and slipped down to the basement. The chain was off the door there, so we guessed it would be the elevator.

“Then you appeared! If ever anybody looked guilty as hell it was you, my darling. You carried a gun, and you slid downstairs and out of the house as if you were on your way to kill someone. Hopper grabbed my arm. ‘My God, the secretary!’ he said. ‘So she’s in it too!’

“He sent one of the men to follow you, and he was so sure you were out for murder that he listened for a shot for the next hour. Then when you came back I had all I could do to keep him from strangling you. You started around with that flashlight, and it looked as though the game was up.