That was how the Cloisters got its name.

He was followed by others, of course. The exodus from the city had begun. In the next ten years—by the time I was seventeen—our beloved lanes had become cement roads, the George Washington Spring where all the valley had sent its cars for huge bottles of drinking water had become a clay pipe draining into a sewer, the old Coleman farm was a country club with an eighteen-hole golf course, and in due time a Hunt Club was organized, with a pack of hounds.

There was no feud between the two settlements, of course. Beverly simply went on being Beverly. The Hill remained the Hill. When they met, as they did eventually at the country club, they merely hit and bounced off. Now Maud Wainwright proposed to bring them together.

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said, eyeing me. “I’ve lived here eighteen years, and I don’t know a woman in Beverly by her first name.”

I smiled. It was difficult for me to believe that she was not on first-name terms with anybody.

“It took my mother ten years to bring herself to leave cards up here. Then she simply left them and went on.”

“But why?” she demanded. “It’s idiotic.”

“You were city people. Naturally you drew your friends from there.”

“And Beverly didn’t want us?”

“Beverly had its own life too. It was pretty well self-contained. It still is. You have to remember that we seldom saw any of you, especially the women, and it’s women who make social contacts. You motored to town and back. The men met, of course; on the trains, or at clubs in the city. It just happened that way,” I added. “It’s odd, when you think about it. I have lived in Beverly all my life. You’ve been here eighteen years. And I have seen you exactly twice.”

That amused her. She laughed a little, shuffling the place cards in her big, well-shaped hands.

“I see,” she said. “The queen was in her counting-house, counting out her money. This awful house! Isn’t it silly, Pat? And what the hell am I going to do about this party? Dr. Sterling suggests I get sick and call it off.”

“Go ahead with it,” I told her impulsively. “Everybody is coming, and everybody is going to like it. You might even have the young crowd in to dance afterward. I can make a list and telephone, if you like.”

The idea enchanted her. She liked young people, and in a few minutes I had the best city band on the telephone and we were making a frenzied list. Only the other day I came across the list. Audrey Morgan was on it, and Larry Hamilton, and I found myself back in the car with Audrey the morning last fall when she told me about the revolver. Getting out her black-bordered handkerchief and saying hysterically, “She hated him. She wanted him dead.”

I was near committing murder myself that day.