Bessie sulkily denied using the phone at all. “I had better things to do,” she said. “Why on earth would I call her, day or night?”

I had rather a pleasant day or two after that, what with Maud fussing over me and Tony spending a brotherly hour or so with me before dinner every evening. Also my rooms were full of flowers. The Hill people had sent a lot of them, and so had the valley. Amy said the place looked like a first-class funeral parlor, but was secretly proud.

“Good heavens!” she would say dramatically when Thomas or Stevens brought up more boxes. “I wasn’t hired to take care of a greenhouse.”

My ankle steadily improved. Once a day Bill Sterling came in to change the bandages. He was determinedly cheerful, but he looked wretched, his ugly attractive face drawn and his eyes showing a lack of sleep. One evening he sent Amy out of the room on an errand and sat back, eyeing me.

“See here, Pat,” he said. “What’s it all about, anyhow?”

“You know as much as I do, Bill.”

“I’m not sure I do. What’s Bessie doing here? What happened to Maud Wainwright last month? She’d had a shock of some sort. All that talk about the heat was pure poppycock. And what’s the matter with Tony? He looks as though he’d seen a ghost.”

Well, he looked that way himself. I had no answers for him, although I did say that when Bessie first came Maud had thought she had come about money. He shook his head.

“These people don’t worry about money,” he said. “It’s something else.”

He did not mention Lydia, of course, and Amy was indignant when he left. She has cherished an open passion for him for years. “These people who nurse hopeless love affairs and do nothing about them!” she said. “Why doesn’t he kill Don Morgan? It would be easy enough.”

“How about yourself? You’re crazy about him, but you haven’t killed Lydia!”

“That doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it,” she said darkly. “Turn over and let me rub your back.”

Once or twice during that period Bessie wandered in. She would find my door open and see me propped up in bed with Maud’s pale rose and blue pillows behind me, and she would stand over me, making perfunctory inquiries about my foot. Her real interest was not in me, however. She questioned me repeatedly about my accident, as if she thought I had not told all the truth. “You must have pushed the chair away,” she said. “It was there earlier. I saw it myself.”

“I didn’t. It wasn’t there.”

After she had done this more than once I began to wonder if she herself had moved the chair. It was ridiculous, of course. How could she have known that Roger would want to go out in the night? Or for that matter, why would she want to hurt or kill me? She was hard enough, God knows, but I had never thought her deliberately cruel. But she was certainly uneasy. It was as though something had happened to upset her careful calculations, and she was as puzzled as I was. Indeed, on her second visit she put that into words. “Did you really fall on somebody?” she said. “Or did you put that in to make it harder?”