Yet the thing itself was no secret at all. The village knew it as well as the Hill. Both had accepted it. It was no longer even a matter for gossip. My only defense is that for six years I had been busy and largely detached from all social life. I had been too tired at night to do more than go to bed; and, as I have already said, the Hill was an entity in itself which concerned me not at all.

But that day, when I followed Maud out onto the terrace, I had no idea who Bessie was. I found Maud angry rather than stricken; angry with a cold fury that I had never seen before. She looked at me and tried to pull herself together.

“That devil,” she said. “It wasn’t enough for her to spoil Tony’s life. She has to come back and do it all over again. What brought her here? She’s got some wickedness in her mind. It sticks out all over her.”

“Who is she, Maud?” I asked. “I’ve never seen her before.”

She gave me a look of sheer incredulity. “Who is she?” she repeated. “Do you mean to say you don’t know?”

“No.”

“Good heavens,” she said. “I thought all the world knew it. It wasn’t her fault if it didn’t. The papers played it up enough, God knows—bell, book, and candle, whatever that means.” She looked at me, and I must have been pale, for she sighed. “I thought you knew, Pat. I’m sorry.”

Bessie, she said, was Tony’s wife.

I cannot remember how much I heard that day or how much of it came later. I was not thinking. It was not that I had fallen in love with Tony, but I must have been on the way without knowing it. Perhaps Maud knew it. As I have said, she was shrewd enough, for all her occasional naïveté.

They were not even divorced. Maud, telling me the story that day, said that Bessie had refused to go to Reno and that, while Tony was suspicious of her, he had no proof. Then, too, he had been pretty badly burned. He had not wanted to marry again. He had simply drifted.

“She played him for a sucker from the start,” said Maud, lapsing into the vernacular as she sometimes did. “That was five years ago. It lasted only a year or so, and she never liked it here. We were too provincial, she said. Then she started a flirtation or worse with a man in town, and I paid her half a million dollars to get out and go to Reno. I didn’t tell Tony that,” she added. “He was pretty badly hurt. So far as he knows, she just left him.” She groaned and got up. “I’ll have to let him know somehow. It will give him a little time.”

I could see that she was badly shaken. She had always gone her way, big, placid, and simple, with an almost childish faith in her fellow men.