He hesitated. “I’ll just say this, then we’ll let it go for good. Every man makes a mistake now and then. Mine was Bessie. I’ve paid for it. Maybe she has too. Only don’t let her hurt you, my dear. She’s rather good at that.”

He was more cheerful after that, as though he had gotten something off his mind.

“How’s your tennis?” he inquired. “I feel like swatting something tonight. Better than your golf?”

He turned on the lights in the playhouse, found me some tennis shoes in a locker, and we played a couple of sets. He played like a demon that night, but at the end his face was relaxed, as though he had worked off some deep anger. He grinned at me when it was over.

“I’ll bet you never learned that game of yours at business school.”

“Can’t you let me forget my job for a minute?”

“My darling, that’s the only thing about you I ever do forget.”

To my surprise he put his arms around me, and rested his head on my shoulder, like a small boy seeking comfort.

“What am I going to do, Pat?” he said thickly. “What am I going to do?”

That was all. He let me go, and after closing and locking the playhouse we started back. He was quiet. He spoke only once, and then it was about his mother.

“She’s not like herself,” he said. “She’s changed. It isn’t Bessie. She was different before that. Don’t tell me it was the heat. She’s a salamander, whatever that is. What’s wrong, Pat?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “If it didn’t seem impossible I’d say she was afraid of something.”

“She’s never been afraid of anything in her life,” he said, almost roughly. “Never.”

I lay awake for a long time that night. I heard Stevens admit Bessie at two o’clock, but shortly after that I fell asleep and slept heavily. As a result I never knew the house had been entered until morning.

I had not even heard Roger give the alarm, or Tony going downstairs to investigate. He had taken his automatic, but by that time the intruder was gone. The door at the end of the west hall was standing wide open, and it looked as though the chain had not been put up.

Stevens, however, interrogated by Tony, insisted that it had been. “I let Mrs. Wainwright in by that door after she left her car at the garage,” he said stiffly. “She stood by while I put the chain up. She was lighting a cigarette. I’m sure she’ll bear me out, sir.”

But Bessie, awakened at the unreasonable hour of eight in the morning, said she knew nothing about it.

“Why should I?” she said shrilly. “I came in and went to bed, and if you’ll let me alone I’m staying there.”

Nothing had been taken, but Jim Conway, coming up that day to look about, was inclined to discredit Stevens’s story.