“I wish you wouldn’t worry so, Lydia,” I said. “After all, you did what no other woman I know would have done. You took him back and cared for him.”

“I let him down too. Audrey thinks so. But how could I know he was able to get about? Pat, what was his idea? He wasn’t sick. He wasn’t even penniless. Why did he come back? If he’d stayed away he would still be alive.”

“Not necessarily. There’s a story about that, isn’t there? Whichever road a man chooses leads to the same end.”

She was not listening. She turned to me suddenly. “Pat, could it have been that girl he ran away with? He left her, you know. Abandoned her somewhere abroad.”

All at once I remembered Bessie. Bessie who had vaguely known a man named Morgan in Paris. Bessie who had been at the club the night of the murder, Bessie with her cold blue eyes and her baby stare. But Jim Conway had said no woman could have done it; at least, not alone. Besides, how old was Bessie? She claimed to be twenty-eight, although I thought she was older. Still, fifteen years ago—

Lydia was still talking. It did her good, I think. She went back over the whole story. Don’s telephone message to her and his arrival. He had seemed discouraged and feeble when, after dark that night, she had met him at the train and brought him back.

“He seemed hardly able to get into the car,” she said. “But I don’t believe it now, Pat. I think he was acting.”

However that might be, Audrey had made a great fuss over him, and between them they got him upstairs to the guest room, where the bed was already turned down, and Audrey had put new magazines beside the reading lamp. She herself had unpacked his bags, and had been surprised to find how good his clothes were: a dinner suit, a blue serge, and the suit he had worn for the journey. He had said a friend in New York gave him an outfit, but it wasn’t true. The suits had been made in London and his name was in the pockets.

“He had overlooked that,” she said, “but I began to be doubtful that night. It was too late, of course. He was there and Audrey was excited and happy. I had to go on.”

The first time she really wondered about his illness was a day or two later. A bottle of Scotch was missing from downstairs and she thought he had taken it. She said nothing but after that she watched him.

“He wasn’t really weak,” she said in that new flat voice of hers. “And, of course, if he was actually sick he oughtn’t to have had whisky.”

It had resulted in his never being left alone. She or Audrey was always about. Not in his room necessarily. Just somewhere at hand. She thought it annoyed him. He would try to get them away together, but she was increasingly suspicious. He had come back for some purpose of his own, but she couldn’t imagine what it was.