“In fact, it’s in yours?”

“Yes.”

At that he turned to face her once more. His look, she saw, had lost none of its admiration. He said, slyly: “That sounds a very satisfactory arrangement.”

She wished she could lose her temper, but that had never been any use with Charles Bannister. The warm room, and the three drinks, and the man a few feet from her, seemed to be combining to rob her of ten years of self-sufficiency. She could hardly recognize her own voice as she answered him.

“I don’t hold on to the money. Now and then I distribute some of it. I gave a donation of ten thousand dollars to the Central School for the Blind, only last week.”

He nodded, walking forward, holding his fresh drink carefully. “I read about it … I hoped you weren’t overdoing things … What percentage was it?”

“Percentage of what?”

“Of the total takings.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh yes, you do.” He grinned suddenly, intimately: it took her back many years, to half a dozen tainted incidents. “Come off it, Belle! I know you’re on to a good thing. I just want to make it a better one.”

Chapter Nine

They were still talking, two hours and many drinks later. Charles Bannister, she found, had altered not at all: he was still as persuasive, as self-confident, and as completely amoral as he had ever been. For one thing, he simply would not believe that Mrs Bannister was not running Esther for her own personal profit; for another, he refused to agree that anything he might have done in the past could possibly come between himself and his lawful wife … There was about him, in spite of his shabby clothes, a special blend of charm, impudence, and determination, which aided both these arguments; and the whisky, Mrs Bannister realized, was not greatly helping her to establish anything to the contrary.

The fire settled lower in the grate: outside, the traffic noises along Commonwealth Avenue died to nothing; here, waylaid in her own home by a man she had loved long ago, she battled for a sane outcome to an absurd and crucial situation. But as the time went by, she battled less and less effectively. Charles Bannister had altogether too much on his side. He had the past, which for all its iniquity had included also the indelible tenderness of first love: he had the present, summed up in the brash confidence of an attractive man; and he had the future, which appeared to involve, for good measure, a guarantee of blackmail.

Alcohol, fear, and her own silly heart were making these things irresistible.

“Don’t tell me,” he said authoritatively at one point, when they were still arguing about her good intentions: “don’t tell me that you set out on this money-making effort with the idea of turning everything over to charity. I’ll lay you anything you like that you’ve done nothing of the sort. You said yourself that you’ve been building up a bank balance. You must have been spending a lot of the money, too.”