A dram of poison

"I will," he promised.

"And pay Mrs. Violette off . . ."

''Yes."

"And I'll be back, four-ish ..."

''Yes, Ethel. Goodbye, dear. Good luck. You have been--perfectly fine."

"Pish tush," said Ethel. "Of course. Well, I'm off."

Mr. Gibson closed the door.

He went into the living room and sat down. Mrs. Violette was ironing. He would not, of course, kill himself i until she had gone.

He was a fastidious and thoughtful man. (He could not help it.) There would be no mess about this. Nothing distressing for anyone to clean up. Nothing horrible. He . knew where he would go and what he would take. It was quick and surely neat. He would be found lying in full decorum on his bed, in all peace. They would think, for a while, that he slept. The shock would thus be graduated and as gentle as he could make it.

But he must leave a letter. The letter must be just so. It must set everything as free as could be.

His blood felt cold. He must try not to be sentimental. This was a choice he was making, icy and clear. He didn't fear the dying. He tried to look beyond.

He had no insurance to be affected by a suicide. Rosemary would have his few bonds, his bank account. Yes, a letter to that effect, too. She'd be all right. Paul would stand by. (She would be free.) Ethel of course was self-sufficient. Ethel would help Rosemary to understand— what he chose they should understand. There was absolutely nothing to worry about.

Except the bomb which would blow up their world one day, but this he could not help.

Everyone's doom was his own.

Mr. Gibson sat in a dream.

At twelve o'clock he was dressed and ready to go downtown, and Mrs. Violette was finished. So he paid her. "Mr. Gibson, could I have this old string?" she asked him, and showed him what she had fished from the kitchen wastebasket.

"Of course,", he said. "Do you need any more?" "I got a lot of stuff to tie up," she admitted. "We're going to take 'most everything in the back of the truck "

"How about this?" He gave her a ball of mustard-colored twine.

"That's Miss Gibson's." Mrs. Violette's small but ripe-lipped mouth made a hiss of the appellation.

"Well?" he bridled. "Surely I may present you with a bit of string."

Mrs. Violette said, "I don't like to take her stuff. Never mind, anyhow. I got to go to the bank and I can pick some up . . ."

"Take it," he said urgently. "I'd like you to take this."

"Well, then . . ." Mrs. Violette seemed to understand his need. She began to wind twine upon her spread fingers.

"No, take it all," he said. "Please do."

"I don't like to take more than I'll use."

"I know that," he told her. This was, he fancied, a rather silly, very trivial rebellion. He just wanted something to be as it used to be. He wanted to feel—generous. (Or ... for all he knew, he wanted, in some ridiculous revenge, to do his sister Ethel out of the price of a ball of twine.)

Mrs. Violette took the whole ball. "I'm sorry to leave you and Mrs. Gibson," said she.

"I'm sorry if my sister has upset you," he said tiredly

"Me and Joe are going up to the mountains," said Mrs. Violette. He perceived that this was an answer. "And I got to be ready by five o'clock . . ." She stopped speaking and looked at him. He had the strange conviction that she knew what he proposed to do.

"That's all right," he said soothingly.

Mrs. Violette's face lit in a rare smile. "Well, then, goodbye," she said. "They say that means 'God be with you.' "

"Goodbye," said Mr. Gibson rather fondly.

She went out the kitchen door with the ball of twine in her pocket. Now he was all alone.

At 12:10 o'clock he left the cottage and walked . . . doing quite well without his cane, although he lurched when he came down upon the shortened leg and could not help it . . . went two blocks west, crossed the boulevard

there and caught a bus for downtown. Paul Townsend he had left safe at home behind him, working away in his herb garden this morning. So Mr. Gibson knew how to get what he wanted.

He did not see the people on the bus. He did not notice the familiar scenery as the vehicle proceeded on the boulevard, then went threading around residential comers until it came upon a business street and thicker traffic. Mr. Gibson, in a mood both bitter and dangerously sweet, was composing a letter.

There was a temptation to be pathetic, and he must resist it. He must make Rosemary understand the cold choice. He must in no way seem to reproach her ... A difficult letter. What words would do this?

He came out of his absorption in time to get off the bus on a downtown corner. This little city had grown, like all California towns, as a wild weed grows. It had left the college here, and in its own park, close to the town's old center . . . and had sent tentacles romping out into valleys and lowlands on all sides. But Mr. Gibson would not go there, to the college—to walk on a campus path and be spoken to by name . . . not again. They would not miss him very much, he thought. Some younger man would come in. . . .

Paul Townsend's place of business was a block and a half in the opposite direction, and Mr. Gibson turned his uneven steps that way. He began to imagine his next moves . . . and, as he did so, he realized that he ought to have brought a container. He stopped in at a delicatessen and purchased the first small bottle he saw on the shelf. It happened to be a two-ounce bottle of imported olive oil, and quite expensive. '

"I am Kenneth Gibson. Mr. Townsend's neighbor. He asked me to stop by and fetch a letter out of his desk," said Mr. Gibson with cool nerves.

"Oh yes. Can I get it for you, Mr. Gibson?"

"He told me exactly where to put my hand on it . . . if you don't mind . . ."

"Not at all," the girl said. "This way, Mr. Gibson." She knew who he was . . . Mr. Gibson of the English Department ... a trustworthy man. "In here," she said with a smile, and ushered him into the laboratory.

He did not look at the cupboards but went to Paul's desk and opened the left top drawer and took, at ran-

dom, an old letter out of a pile. "This seems to be the one."

"Good," she said.

"Er . . ." Mr. Gibson looked distressed and embarrassed. "Is there by any chance a . . . er . . . men's room . . .?"

"Oh yes," she said becoming at once crisp and remote. "Right over there, sir." She indicated a door.

"Thank you."

As he had calculated, she left for the outer regions.

He went into the small washroom and turned the cap upon the bottle of olive oil and gravely poured the contents away into the sink.

He came out. Now the laboratory was his alone. He found the key with no trouble. He took down No. 333. His hands were steady as he poured its liquid content into his own container. It was a delicate task, from one small opening into another, but he was cold and clearheaded. He scarcely spilled a drop.

He did not take it all. As he put No. 333 back in place he thought the depletion of the supply would not be noticed for some time. He made no attempt to wipe off fingerprints or anything of that sort. He had elected not to take the whole bottle from the cupboard away with him, only because he needed time. Time to get home. Time to write his letter. He did not want the fact of some missing poison noted too soon and the girl asked and his name given and he interrupted.

Mr. Gibson put the poison he had stolen into the green paper bag, relocked the cupboard, hid the key, left the premises. He thought he might have made a cool and successful thief: he might as well have been a thief all his life for all the difference. . . .

He stood on the downtown comer, waiting for a bus, feeling absolutely numb for the moment. Just as one came, just as he got on, he thought he heard his name spoken. But he wasn't certain, didn't really care whether anyone had called his name or not. ... so he moved on and sat down by a window.

I have a tree, a graft of love That in my heart has taken root Sad are the buds and blooms thereof And bitter sorrow is its fruit—

Oh, stop! Stop this senseless jingling of old words. Villon was long dead.

Looking blindly out, the thought crossed his veering mind capriciously that perhaps he'd had, just now, a supernatural warning. But he knew what he was doing. Death. Well? He was simply going to step out of his doom. To him it seemed not an unintelligent thing to do. A just God would understand.

• How could he put this in a letter? "... Very tired . . ." he would write. No. No. It was possible that he would have to lie. What matter if he did or did not lie? ". . . I am not as well as I appear. I have known for a long time . . ." Should he hint that he had begun to doubt his sanity? Yes, that . . . Rosemary should understand. And perhaps he was insane. In fact, he did not and could not know himself, really why he was doing this deed. Not even this could he know. Doom. In the iceberg of his subconscious the motive lay and worked.

Mr. Gibson, sunk in icy gloom, saw nothing out the windows, nothing inside the bus which went its doomed way on the streets of the town carrying all the doomed people. If he could have done anything for Rosemary, or for any living soul ... he might have stayed. But all, all were doomed, and to help each other or even to love each other was only another illusion.

Some sense of time and space prodded him to notice the stop that would let him off at the comer where the market was. So he got up and, filled with such pain that he was nearly blinded, he went toward the door. As he stepped off, he thought he heard his name called again. Angels? Well, if he was about to damn himself through eternity, then he was going to do so. All his life he had done all the duty he had been given to see, made his apparent choices, and if he still had an illusion of choice, this deed appeared to him to be as much his duty as his pleasure . . . and he would do it.

And one duty besides ... a promise to keep . . . the marketing he had said he would do for Ethel. Then he would corne (with what relief) to the end of his duties.

So Mr. Gibson went into the big market and took a wheeled basket and pushed it along the aisles. He selected lettuce, he took cocoa, he took a loaf of thin-sliced white

bread ... he took cheese (the kind Ethel preferred). And he took tea for Rosemary. (It might comfort her.)

He stood at the check stand, dumb and lost in utter helplessness, while the girl fingered the buttons and rang the prices. He lifted the big brown bag in his arms. He walked two blocks east, and one north. ....

The roses at the far side of the cottage were not blooming now.

Old Mrs. Pyne was sitting in her wheel chair on the' Townsend's porch. She waved cheerily at him.

Mr. Gibson staggered his course to bring himself near enough to speak to her. (He could ask her. He could inquire about Paul and what the Church might say about marriage and divorcees. . . . But why? He didn't want to divorce Rosemary and be, for God knew how many years, her and her husband's friend. No, he didn't want that loophole into life. He would rather pretend it wasn't there. Kid himself, he thought bitterly, that the deed would be done for Rosemary's sake.)

He said, "Hello . . ." weakly.

"Goodness!" said the old lady leaning forward, "isn't that too heavy for you, Mr. Gibson?"

"Not too heavy." (But it was. It was heavy, his bag of food and death.) "How are you, Mrs. Pyne?" He smiled falsely.

"I'm all right," she said. "Isn't this a glorious day?" Her voice took on a special and almost shocking vigor. "It's so marvelous to be able to sit out in the sun."

"Yes," he said. "Yes . . . well . . ."

He stumbled across the double driveways. He heard Paul's voice calling, "Hi! How goes it?" Mr. Gibson pretended not to hear.

Marvelous to be able to sit in the sun? It was! Yes, it was! He unlocked his door and went in, beginning to know that, quite possibly, he could not do what he had planned to do. So in a night and a morning of acute depression— he had only made a fool of himself once more. He, Kenneth Gibson, was not cut out to be a suicide. No. He was fated to set Rosemary free and be her and her husband's good friend for his natural life and limp on in time and bear all. It was not his doom to die today. He couldn't change his doom. Doom is not doom if there is any way out of it. And he was doomed ... to go on being the neat, decent, too thin-skinned little man he had been JDorn to be.

Because it was marvelous to be able to sit in the sun! And this was enough to keep a man alive!

Mr. Gibson began to feel a bit hysterical. No, no, he •juould do it! One second of resolution—that was all he Qeeded. Surely he could manage to lift hand to mouth— one quick gesture—without thought . . .

But if he waited to write a letter. No, no! His whole decision was running away, running out of him. But couldn't the doomed of God ask a little kindness of the devil? Quick, then! Or suffer the tragicomedy out, be a spectator in his own skull and watch his ovni acts with what bitter amusement could be salvaged.

He was in the kitchen. He did not have—he did not even want—that kind of courage. Not any more.

He put the big brown bag on the counter. He took out the head of lettuce, the piece of cheese, loaf of bread, the box of tea, and, heavy at the bottom of the bag, the can of cocoa. And now he groped for the bottle of death. He would do it at once!

The big bag was absolutely empty.

Yes, quickly.

His hand met nothing.

His death would be a mystery: death always was. Where—?

But surely he had put the small green paper bag, twisted up around the little bottle, into the market basket, and the checker girl would have put it in with his purchases. She hadn't. It wasn't here.

Where was it? The terrible quick poison he had gone so far to steal?

He searched his jacket pockets. Not there!

Had he dreamed the whole thing? No, surely he remembered pouring the olive oil into the sink far too vividly to have done it in a dream. He had lost it? But the poison was now in a bottle labeled "olive oil." Nobody would have any way of knowing it was poison! Colorless, odorless, instant . . .

What had he done?

Oh, what wicked error had he made this time?

Where had he left a bottle of poison that looked so innocent? In what public place where innocent people came and went?

The shock nearly caused him to fall down. Then his blood raced and cried no no no m perfect revulsion.

Well, it was the end of him. The end of Kenneth Gibson. The end of all respect for him, forever. But somebody else was going to get the poison and die of it unless he could jjrevent this.

The lightning change of all his purposes sent him stumbling to the telephone. He dialed. He said, "Police." His voice did not sound like his own. Every bit of any kind of courage he had, stiffened his spine. Face it. All right. No nonsense, now. A sickness seemed to fall off him.

The front door of the cottage opened. His wife Rosemary was standing there.

"I came," she said, intent upon herself and her own thoughts, "because I have got to talk to you. I can't—be such a rabbit—" Her face changed. "Kenneth, what's the matter?"

He had held up his hand for her to be silent. He thrust away every thought but one.

"Police? This is Kenneth Gibson. I have mislaid a small bottle filled with deadly poison." He articulated very clearly and spoke forcefully. "The bottle is labeled olive oil. It is roughly a pyramid, about five inches high, and it's inside a green paper bag. Nobody is going to know that it is poison. Can you do anything? Can you find it? Can you put out a warning?"

Rosemary shrank back against the door.

"I stole it. From a laboratory. . . . Can't give you the name of the stuff. It is odorless, tasteless . . . fatal. . . . Yes, sir. I took a Number Five bus at the comer of Main and Cabrillo at about a quarter after one o'clock. Got off at Lambert and the Boulevard . . . must have been one forty-five. I was in the market there possibly ten or fifteen minutes. It's just after two o'clock now. . . . Yes. Walked to my house . . . and just now discovered I haven't got it. . . . No, I am absolutely sure. . . . I put it in the olive-oil ; bottle. . . . Brand? King somebody-or-other. . . . Yes, I " did that. . . . Why? Because I was going to use it myself," he told the barking questioner on the line. "I intended to kill myself."

Rosemary whimpered. He did not look at her.

"Yes, I know it may kill somebody else. That's why I'm calling. . . ." The voice raged in a controlled way. "Yes, I am criminal," said Mr. Gibson. "Anything you say. Find it. Please, do all you can to find it."

He gave his name again. His address. His phone number.

He put the phone upon the cradle.

"Why?" said Rosemary.

He had thought never to see her again.

"Kenneth, I didn't. I didn't. Forgive me. I didn't — "

He scarcely heard what she said. He spoke harshly. "Go back to your shop. Know nothing about this. Don't get into it. Leave me. I may have caused someone to die. I may be a murderer. No good to you now. Leave me." He willed her to vanish.

Rosemary shoved herself away from the slab of the door, and stood on her feet. She said, "No. I will not leave you. It isn't going to happen. Nobody will be poisoned. We will go and find it."

He made a gesture of despair. "Oh no, mouse, no use to dream . . ."

"That's wrong" said Rosemary. ''That's untrue. We can find the poison. I can— and I fjuill. And you'll come too. Paul will help us!" she cried and whirled and opened the door. "Come . . ." she said imperiously.

"All right," said Mr. Gibson. "We can try, I suppose."

He walked out into the sunshine. He was very cold. He was as good as dead. He was so ruined a man—by this stroke of fate or whatever it was—it seemed to him that he had most unfortunately survived himself.

Rosemary ran, calling, "Paul! Paul!"

Paul bobbed up from behind a hedge. "What's up?" he said cheerfully.

"Help us. Kenneth had some poison. . . . He's left it someplace. We have to find it."

"Poison! What's this!"

"Your car. Please. Please, Paul. It's in a bottle labeled olive oil. Anybody might get it. He's left it at the market Or on a bus. We have to go there."

Paul tossed her some keys. "Get out the car," he said. His hand clenched around Mr. Gibson's forearm. "What's she talking . . . ?"

"It is Number Three thirty-three," Mr. Gibson said perfectly distinctly, "I went downtown and stole it from your cupboard."

"What in heller

"I was going to kill myself," said Mr. Gibson without apology. "Now I may kill somebody else."

Paul stepped back and withdrew his hand as if from contamination. He turned and yelled at Rosemary. "Did you call the police?"

She was vanishing into Paul's garage. "Yes! Yfts! Hurry! Hurry!" she shouted.

Paul said, "Got to tell Mama—get a shirt—" He leaped up on his porch. "Don't go without me," he yelled back over his shoulder. Mr; Gibson stood still. Rosemary was in the garage trying to start a strange car.

But the quiet neighborhood was still quiet. This crisis was like a dagger plunged into flesh that did not yet feel any wound. He, the cause, stood still and could smell lavender and feel the weight of the sun's heat. He experienced a moment out of time. He might as well have killed himself, for he knew he was lost. But also he was being bom again. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the caress of the light.

Then Paul's De Soto came bucking and plunging backward. It stopped and Rosemary swung the door and leaned out. "Get in."

Mr. Gibson went meekly, and climbed into the front seat as she shoved over. She seemed to be quite sure that Paul was coming to do the driving.

Paul came in an instant, buttoning a blue shirt over his naked chest. He shoved long legs under the wheel. "Where to, Rosie?"

"The market," she said decisively.

Mr. Gibson sat in the middle. He might as well have been a wax dummy.

"I called Jeanie to come home," Paul said, speaking as if his teeth were ready to chatter. "She's at her music lesson. Mama will be all right alone for half an hour. I'd just helped her to lie down. Didn't tell her why. Couldn't leave her with a shock. . . . What got into him?" said Paul angrily.

"I must have been crazy," said Mr. Gibson quietly. It was the easiest thing to say. He was beyond horror and beyond pain.

"Pray it's in the market," said Rosemary, "and they've found it. Paul, do you know what it is? It is poison?"

"It's dangerous stufT, all right. As I told him—How did he get at it?" Paul demanded with that anger.

The ghost of Mr. Gibson explained, and Paul grimaced as if he had to hold his teeth clenched. There seemed a convention that Mr. Gibson could speak and be heard and yet not be considered quite solidly there. Paul was perspiring. The car went jerkily. It was only three blocks to the market. "What are you doing home, Rosie?" Paul said in a nervous explosion.

"I wanted to talk to him. Alone. I didn't like — This is the first day Ethel's been . . ." They had turned the comer "Look! A police car!"

If Mr. Gibson felt a twinge: it felt like simple wonder. What, he wondered, was going to happen next?

He tried to push at this wonder and make himself feel alive. What was he doing plunging around the streets—? Who was he? Who were these people, young, busy, pushing people . . . Rosemary thrusting both legs out of the car to the pavement of the market's parking lot and Paul yanking on the brake and tumbling out the other side.

Mr. Gibson sat for a moment, abandoned and strangely exposed, for both front doors of Paul's car were flapping, open. When he felt a stirring somewhere at the bottom of his being it was still remarkably simple. It was curiosity.

So he slid under the wheel and got, as nimbly as he could, out of the car. He limped rapidly after them into the market.

Chapter Xlll

Cure I know him," The little checker girl was saying. She had black tangled hair, enormous dark eyes, and wore huge gold buttons in her ears. "I always thought he was nice, you know what I mean? Sure, I saw him. Thafs him, isn't it? But I didn't see no green paper bag. It wasn't in with his groceries. He didn't have no green paper bag. See . . ." She moved closer to the tall policeman and looked up at him almost yearningly. "We aren't busy so close to lunch. We never are. So I seen him come in. Right in that door. He didn't look good. He looked like he was sick or something. I seen his bare hands. If he had it, then he musta had it in his pocket. Did you look in his pockets?"

"Did you look in your pockets?" Rosemary flashed around and seemed to bear down upon him. (She wasn't anybody he knew.) Then the policeman seemed to be searching him while Mr. Gibson stood helpless as a dummy or a small child whose elders don't trust the accuracy of his reports.

The checker girl said, almost weeping, "Why'd he want to do a thing like that? Gee, I thought he was nice. . . . I mean some customers aren't so nice, you know, but he was nice." She used the past tense as if he had died. Nobody answered her.

"And listen," she sobbed. "I didn't put no green paper bag in with anybody else's stuff, either. Only been three or four people through my stand. It isn't here. Probably he never had no poison." She peeked at Mr. Gibson fearfully.

"If it isn't here," said Rosemary, tensely, "it must be on the bus."

"Wa-ait a minute," the policeman said. ''Now—" His eyes were cold. They fixed upon Mr. Gibson as if he were an object and an obstacle. (One could tell that he was used to obstacles.) "You are positive that you had this green paper bag with this poison in it when you got on the bus?"

"Yes, I am positive," said Mr. Gibson with perfect composure.

"And when you got home?"-"

"It wasn't there.''

''You were emotionally upset?" the policeman said. ''You think you forgot it on the bus, then?"

"I 'forgot' it," said Mr. Gibson, "because, I suppose, subconsciously I did not really want . . ." The words were coming out of him as from a parrot.

Rosemary took his arm rather roughly. 'T)o you want a stranger to die?" she cried at him.

The knife went in. "No," said he. "No. No."

"Well, then!" said Rosemary with a curious air of triumph. "You see, it isn't true!"

Paul said, "Wait a minute. What are the police doing?"

The policeman said, "They are after the bus, all right. And we are broadcasting. I'll search this building thoroughly, now, just in case . . ."

"What do you think the chances ...?''

The policeman shrugged. He didn't think much of them. He was a sad man. He'd seen a lot of trouble. He did his

best and let it go at that. "Whoever might find a bottle— looks like it's olive oil—might throw it away," said he. "Might take it home—use it. Who can say what people are going to do?"

Ethel can, thought Mr, Gibson, and for a moment feared he might whinny this forth nervously.

"Can't we find the bus?" Rosemary was urging.

"Gee, Rosie, I dunno," said Paul. "Are you sure he shouldn't be seeing a doctor . . ." Paul jittered.

Rosemary said, "Hurry, hurry . . ."

The checker girl said, "Oh gosh, I hope you find it! I hope nothing bad is going to happen!" She peered at Mr. Gibson from her eye corners. "Look, you're all right now, aren't you?" She seemed to care.

Mr. Gibson couldn't answer. What was it to be "all right," he wondered, with a shadowy sadness.

Then they were back in the car, as before.

"Number Five. That is the bus that goes on out the boulevard?" asked Rosemar)'.

"Yes."

"But how will we know which one? Did you notice any number on it?"

"No."

"But the police could get the number of the right bus, couldn't they? Since they know the time you caught it downtown, the time you got off at the market."

"Maybe."

"Then, maybe they have caught it already. They must have. It's two fifteen."

Rosemary was babbling! It was vocalized worry. Mr. Gibson was answering in monosyllables. Paul was driving the car. He wasn't driving it very well. The car jerked and jittered. The man was nervous. Mr. Gibson—so curiously removed from self by his ruination (which was complete) —found his senses able to perceive. He felt a resurgence of an old power. He was no longer cut off. Paul, he realized, shrank from him as evil. Paul was almost superstitiously afraid of a man who had intended to kill himself.

Mr. Gibson wondered if he ought to try to explain. The trouble was ... he could not now remember how it had gone, all his reasoning. He thought it odd to be sitting in the middle with the two of them so bent on preserving him from the doom of becommg a murderer. Doom ... ah yes, that was the word. Now he remembered. . .

"I was going to write a letter," he said out loud. "I was going to explain ... At least, I—"

"Well, don't!'' said Rosemary vehemently. "Not now. Just don't talk about it. Whatever you thought, whatever it was, whatever it is. Now, we have to find that terrible stuff and stop it from hurting anyone. Afterward," she said grimly, "you can talk about it if you want to. Paul, can you drive faster?"

"Listen," said Paul, nervous and sweating. "I'd just as soon not wreck us, you know . . ."

Rosemary said, "I know. I know," and she pounded with her small female fists the side of Paul's car. "But I am to blame for this" said Rosemary.

Mr. Gibson tried to protest but she turned and looked fiercely into his eyes. "And you are to blame. We are to blame. That has to be true. I'll prove it to you. I'm tired" she cried. "I am so tired—"

Paul said, "Don't talk, Rosie. He must have been crazy. Let it go and say he was crazy."

But Mr. Gibson had a strange feeling of solidity. He thought. Yes, of course, I am to blame.

The boulevard was a divided street. In the weedy center space there lay old streetcar tracks, now superseded by the bus line. The boulevard was lined with little low apartment buildings, arranged in the charming California style, around grassy courts, and in a gay variety of colors . . . pink ones, yellow ones, green ones ... all sparkling clean and bright in the light of this fine day. Like big beads on the pretty chain, there came from time to time the shopping centers. A huge food market, with banks of red and yellow and orange fruit along the sidewalk, its bulk like a mother hen beside its chicks—the drugstore, laundromats.

After ten minutes of going, the boulevard lost its center strip and became just a street curving off through residential patches into a long valley, where houses became smaller and shabbier and more countrified as the city frayed about the edges. Mr. Gibson, sitting in the middle, looked at all this scenery as if he had come upon a new planet.

They passed one bus going their way, and, after a while, another. Neither could be the right one.

It was Paul Townsend, now, who was doing the talking. "Number Five turns around at the junction, I think. Let's

see. If you got off about one forty-five, then it would get to the end of its line around two forty or a bit after. We might meet the right bus, coming back. What is it now? Two thirty."

"I can't tell the right bus," Mr. Gibson said. "The police can. Watch the other side of the street . . ." Mr. Gibson's brain, although feebly, was turning over. "Whoever found the bottle," said he with detached composure, "may have gotten off the bus at any stop along the way."

"Yes, but—" Paul's eye flirted nervously toward him. Paul wanted to worry out loud, but not this much.

"In fact, once the bus has turned around to come back —that means that every person who was on it while I was on it, must not be on it any more."

"Maybe whoever found it turned it over to the driver.

Maybe they have like a lost and found department . , ."

"Maybe," said Mr. Gibson stoically.

"Who's going to take and eat food that he just found?"

said Paul. "Especially if it looks as if it has been opened.

Did you break a seal?"

"No seal. It was a question of turning the cap . . ." "How full was the bottle?" • "Full enough."

"It wouldn't pour quite like olive oil.'' "It's oily enough," said Mr. Gibson. "The bottle will smell of olive oil."

"Listen—" said Paul, "even if we don't find it . . . don't forget the police are putting the alarm on the air. That's what he said."

"Not everyone," said Mr. Gibson, "listens constantly to the radio."

Rosemary said, "And we should face the facts, shouldn't we?" She turned her head and looked fiercely at him as before. Her eyes were such a fierce blue. Mr. Gibson realized that inside the body of Rosemary—behind the face of Rosemary—within all the graces of Rosemary, which graces he loved— there was somebody else. A fierce angry determined spirit he had never met and never known. This spirit said boldly, "If anyone dies of that poison, you'll go to jail, I suppose?"

"I suppose," he said and felt indifferent. "In any case, you'll lose your position?" "Yes."

"People will know . . ."

The people in the market, the people on the bus, the police, the neighbors, the puolic. Yes, thought Mr. Gibson, everyone will know. . . .

"But if nobody dies and we find the poison," said Rosemary, ''everything else we can bear. Isn't that a fact?"

Mr. Gibson put his hand up to shield his eyes. It was a fact, as far as he could tell.

"Keep your chin up," said Paul nervously. "Who knows? What time is it? Ten of three—the bus has turned around."

"Look!" said Rosemary. "Look ... up ahead! There it is! There it is!"

Chapter XIV

THERE WERE in fact, two buses. One wide yellow vehicle was pulled up on the shoulder of the road. A black-and-white police car nosed against it from behind. Beside it stood a group of three, two policemen and the bus driver.

The other bus had stopped a few yards ahead and a group of people—ten or a dozen—were climbing on. These people seemed, all of them, to be looking back with crooked necks toward the policemen.

Paul made a wild U-turn. His car stuttered and bounced and stopped behind the police car. The time was 2: 54. Mr. Gibson found himself limping after his companions over lumpy sod through tall dust-plastered weeds that grew between the road and a patched wire fence. It was an unexpected setting for a crisis. Most crises, thought Mr. Gibson, take place in unexpected settings.

"I'm Mrs. Gibson," he heard Rosemary cry. "It was mv husband . . . Did you find it? Is it here? The poison?"

Not one of the three men opened his mouth. So Mr. Gibson knew that they had not found it.

"Who are those people getting on that other bus?" cried Rosemary against their silence. "What's happening?"

"Passengers," said one of the policeman. "They don't— none of them—know anything. We're letting them go about their business." He swung around. "You the man left this poison someplace in the olive oil bottle?" He had selected Mr. Gibson instead of Paul . . . and Mr. Gibson nodded.

"Well, we can't find it on this bus."

"Which seat did you sit in?" snapped the second policeman.

Mr. Gibson shook his head.

"How big was the package?"

Mr Gibson showed them mutely, using his hands.

"In a paper bag?"

Mr. Gibson nodded. This policeman, a young one, gave him a disgusted look, sucked air into the comer of his mouth, and swung up through the open door of the bus. He didn't like any part of this situation. His partner, an older man, with a thicker mask on, helped Rosemary up by her elbow. Paul went, too. Four of them ducked and bobbed, searching in there, where the policemen must already have searched.

Mr. Gibson stood in the dusty weeds. This was the bus? He had ridden this bus? He had no recollection of any details at all. Now, here he was, standing in the sun, on the dusty earth, with a field spreading away from him . , . and he, his own survivor.

The bus driver, a lean man in his thirties with a long and rather surprisingly pale face, stood in the weeds, too, hands deep in trouser pockets, watching him. "So you would your own quietus make? Hey?" said the bus driver softly.

Mr. Gibson was inomeasurably startled. "I botched it," said he pettishly.

The bus driver poked out his lips and seemed to be touching his tongue up over his teeth. He moved back far enough to lean in at the door of the bus. "This man sat halfway back on the right side, near the window, alone," he bawled.

The four inside responded by gathering together on the right side of the bus. The driver came forward far enough to lean on the high yellow bus wall.

"You botched it, all right," he said to Mr. Gibson. "Hamlet made a mess of it, too. Hey? Going to try again?" He had sandy lashes.

"I doubt it," snapped Mr. Gibson. "I'll take what's coming to me." He pulled back his shoulders.

"Gibson, hey? Teach at the college, don't you?" the man said. "What do you teach?" "Poetry."

"Poetry! Hah!" The man grinned. "There's a million poems about death, I guess."

"And about love, too." said Mr. Gibson with frozen-feeling lips. This was the oddest, the most unexpected conversation he had ever gotten into.

"Sure—love and death," the bus driver said, "and God and man—and all the real stuff."

"Real?" Mr. Gibson blinked.

"You think it ain't?'' the bus driver said. "Don't gimme that."

The younger policeman came out of the bus. "Nope," he said. "No soap. We'll look again in a few minutes."

"Yeah?" said the driver. "Whassa matter? Don't you trust yourselves?"

"Eyes can do funny tricks," the policeman said stiffly.

"O.K. by me. I don't mind being out of service. Nice day." The bus driver looked at Mr. Gibson again with contemplative eyes.

Rosemary jumped down out of the bus. "What can we dor

Paul behind her, took her arm. "Better go home, Rosie," he murmured. "The broadcast is the only hope, now. Nothing we can do but wait."

"You remember him?" cried Rosemary to the bus driver.

"Sure do, ma'am."

"Did you see the paper bag."

"Might have," said the bus driver, narrowing his eyes. "Seems to me I get the impression he shifted a little package to his other hand when he put his fare in. It's just an impression but I got it. Might mean something."

"Did you see it in his hand when he got off?"

"No, ma'am. People getting off have their backs to me."

"Did you see who took the seat he'd been sitting in . . . ?"

"No, ma'am. Lessee. He got off at Lambert? Well, I had a little poker game with a green Pontiac there—where he got off. This Pontiac and me was outbluffing each other, so I paid no attention. . . ."

"Was the bus full?"

"No, ma'am. Not at that hour."

"Do you understand?" said Rosemary. "It's a deadly poison. In the wrong bottle. Do you understand that?"

The bus driver said sweetly, "I understand." Did you notice anyone getting off with a green paper

"I can't see their hands when they're getting off, ma'am," he reminded her patiently.

Rosemary clasped her own hands and looked off across the field.

Paul said, "Somebody picked it up and took it and there's no way of finding out who. . . . The broadcast warning will either reach him or it won't."

The two cops were Ustening quietly. The older one shifted his weight.

"Maybe," said Rosemary. "Maybe there is something we can do. You were there," she said to the bus driver. "Did you recognize anybody else who was on the bus then?"

"Hey?" said the bus driver, wrinkling his brow.

"Anyone else we could find and ask? Somebody who was also there and might have noticed?"

"Wait a minute." The driver seemed to bristle up. "This stuff's poison, hey?"

Paul said, "Damned dangerous," and looked angry. "He took it from my lab. He knew what it was. He should never . . . Oh, come home, Rosie."

"A stranger," said Rosemary, still addressing the bus driver, "trusting iil a label. Some stranger to us, who doesn't want to die. People do trust labels. . . ."

"Yes," he said, "they got a right to. And there was my blonde."

"Blonde?"

"Yeah, and while she wouldn't ... I don't think. . . . Nobody," said the bus driver forcefully, heaving himself away from his leaning position, "is going to poison my blonde!" He grew taller. "Is that your car?"

"Who is this blonde?" the young policeman said moving in.

"I don't know her name."

"Where does she live?"

"I don't know where she lives.''

"She was on the bus?"

"Yeh, she was on the bus."

"If you don't know her ... how come . . . ?"

"She doesn't know that she's my blonde—not yet. One of these days . . . Aw, I was biding my time. Now look," the bus driver said, "I'm going. One thing I do know and that's the stop she gets off at. I can find her. And nobody's going to poison my blonde."

He set off toward Paul's car.

"Oh yes! Paul," Rosemary cried, "Kenneth, come on! We'll all go, find her. She might have noticed . . . Hurry,

come on

The whole group was streaming toward Paul's car.

The older policeman said, "Wait ... I can call in, you know. I can get a prowl car there in seconds ..."

"Where?" said the driver. "When I don't know where myself? All I got is the stop. Comer of Allen and the Boulevard. What can you do with that? Thanks, anyway, but I guess I got to go find her myself. I'll know her when I see her, see?"

"What about this bus?"

"Life and death," said the driver, with his hand on Paul's car. "Let them fire me." Paul was right behind him. "Give me the keys," the driver said.

"My car . . . I'll drive." Paul looked as if he were suffering. His mouth was grim.

"You are an amateur," said the bus driver, and took the keys out of Paul's hand.

Mr. Gibson knew only that Rosemary's hands were pulling and hustling him. He and she got into the back seat. Paul got in beside the bus driver.

"Good luck," said the older policeman, rather kindly. "Call in, now." The younger one was chewing grass.

The bus driver was moving levers. Paul's car surged backward, slipped out into traffic. It seemed to respond with pleasure to a master's hand. "I can make better time, that's all," the bus driver said. "Driving's my business. Every business has its skills."

"That's all right," Paul murmured.

They were sailing back toward town.

Chapter XV

"The' name's Lee Coffey" said the bus driver suddenly. Paul straightened up with an effect of relaxing, of feeling better. "I'm Paul Townsend," he said in something nearer his normal amiable voice. "A neighbor of the Gibsons'."

"I see. And the lady is Mrs. Gibson."

"Rosie," said Paul, "this is Lee Coffey—"

"Her name is Rosemary" Mr. Gibson heard himself saying loudly. "My name is Kenneth Gibson. I am the man . . ."

"How do, Mrs. Rosemary?" the bus driver said over his shoulder. "Say, Mr. Kenneth Gibson, what was it that was coming to you . . . you'd rather take poison?"

Mr. Gibson tried to swallow with a dry mouth.

Paul said quickly, "No, no, don't talk about it. It was a temporary . . . He didn't even know what he was doing. He must have been crazy. He's all right now."

"What puts him all right, all of a sudden?" the bus driver said.

"Why, he knows ... he has friends. He's got everything to live for."

"Candy?" said the bus driver.

"I don't know what you mean."

"I never could get that," said the bus driver, sliding the car skillfully to a strategic position in the center lane. "How come—now you take a suicide sitting on a ledge up high, see ... ? People trying to talk him out of it, offer the same as loUypops. Everybody's his friend, they tell him. Come home, the dog needs him. Or he can have beer. He can have chocolate. . . . Seems to me if a man gets to the point of taking his life he's got more serious things in his mind. It's no time for candy, is it?"

"You are wrong," said Mr. Gibson forcefully.

"That so?"

"There is one moment when a loud pop is enough, either way."

"I see," said the bus driver. "Yeah .... well, you'd know. That's very interesting."

The car moved. It was not speeding. But no second was lost by indecision or by fumbhng. Mr. Gibson found himself admiring this with peculiar pleasure.

"If you want to talk about it . . ." the bus driver said, and Paul said again, "No, no . . ."

Mr. Gibson answered truthfully. "I'd like to talk to you about it. Not just now, I guess." He felt expanded and relaxed in contact with a mind that interested him. A mind that cheerfully pried off a certain lid ... a lid that had been stifling and muffling and shutting up that which is interesting.

He looked sideways at Rosemary, and her eyes were

visited by the ghost of a smile. "Tell me about your blonde, Mr. Coffey," she said almost'brightly.

"Look at me, rushing to the rescue," the bus driver said, "of a blonde who doesn't know she's mine. I'll tell you a little bit. I see her nearly every day. Watch for her, now. I'm getting to know her. I'm thinking of getting up the nerve to speak to her. Never have. Doesn't matter. I already know that I like her a lot. So how can I let her get the poison? Will this offend her, Mrs. Gibson?"

"Rosemary," said Rosemary gravely. "No, it won't offend her, Mr. Coffey. It won't offend her at all."

"Call me Lee," said the bus driver. "These are unusual circumstances. Listen, Rosemary, she is a beautiful blonde.''

"You are a very interesting man," said Rosemary.

"That's possible," said Lee Coffey thoughtfully.

It was Paul who came in with an ordinary question. "Have you been a bus driver long?"

"Ten years. Since I got out of the Army. Because I like to think."

"Like to think?" Paul repeated after him, seeming to find this shockingly obscure.

"Ruminate. Ruminate," said the bus driver. "That's why I like a useful but not creative job. You start pushing and trying to a purpose ... or even just trying to make a million dollars ... it warps your thinking. My thinking, anyhow. The kind I like."

Paul said, impatient with bewilderment, "How can you possibly find this girl, this blonde, whoever she is . . . ?"

"He'll find her," said Rosemary with parted lips. "Don't you think so, Kenneth?"

"I do," said Mr. Gibson. "I think so." He felt astonished. The car slipped up to a red light and stopped smoothly.

"Mr. Coffey—Lee." Suddenly Rosemary took in a great breath and threw herself on her knees in the tonneau. "Please help me? Tell me something?"

"Sure if I can . . ."

"You are an expert driver. I can see that you are. Will you tell me ... I believe you will know. I can believe you."

"What's the trouble?" said the bus driver, sending them swiftly off the mark as the light changed.

Mr. Gibson sat astonished while Rosemary knelt and poured out words toward this bus driver's ear.

"It is a foggy night," she said. "I am driving. I am trying to be careful. I know ... to the best of my knowledge . . . that I am on the right side of the road."

"Go ahead," said the bus driver encouragingly.

"I also think I know that there is a deep ditch to my right. I think We have come that far . . . you see?"

"Yeah . . . yeah . . ."

"All of a sudden there is a car coming head on . . . and he is on his left side of the road. I have to do something quick."

"Can't deny that," said Lee Coffey cheerfully.

"I turned left" said Rosemary intensely. "You see, I thought . . ." She buried her head on her arm.

"So what happened?" asked the driver.

"He turned to his right, so we collided. Please tell me. You tell me if I was wrong."

The bus driver turned the situation over in his mind. Meanwhile, they glided upon the boulevard, having already reached the spot where the divided street began. The scenery floated by.

"You had three choices," the man said calmly in a moment. "You could turn right, supposed to be proper . . . and take a chance on the ditch. Pretty sure to be dangerous. You could stay where you were because you are legal . . . and take the chance the other fella's going to correct himself and turn off in time. That takes cold nerve and an awful lot of stubborn righteousness. Or, you can turn left as you did and figure to get around him on the clear side . . . even though it's the wrong side ... of the road. Hey?"

"It seemed clear . . ."

"Was it?"

"Well, yes, actually it was clear. You see, I thought ... I thought he might be confused and think he was on his right side. I didn't know he'd turn off. How could I know that?'

"You did no wrong," Lee Coffey said gravely. "You tried for a solution. Who can do more? Makes sense to me."

Rosemary's breath shuddered in. "But the result was that the car hit us on our right, and—Kenneth was hurt. . . . Only Kenneth was hurt. Not me. Tell me, please . . . did I mean to put him between me and that other car? Did I choose to hurt him rather than myself? Is that why I turned to the left, really?"

"You just told me why. you turned left, didn't you?" Lee Coffey said.

"I thought I was trying to save us both. But, you see . . . there was no ditch. I was mistaken about that. We hadn't come to the place where the ditch began to be there, along the right side of the road."

"Fog," said the bus driver. "O.K. You were on the right?"

"Yes."

"He, the other fella, was on his left?"

"Yes."

"And you thought there was this ditch?"

"I think I thought—but Ethel—says, there's no such thing as an accident. As if—as if . . . subconsciously I made happen what I wanted to happen . . ."

"No such thing as an accident!" cried the bus driver. "Where has this Ethel been living?"

"Wait," said Rosemary, warningly. "She's . . . very wise. She's not stupid . . . and she's good . . ."

"She is, eh? Well, I'll tell you something. Nobody's that wise. There happen to be plenty of accidents."

"But are they? Really?"

"The subconscious, hey?" said the bus driver. "Well, I see what she's getting at, all right. Sure. Some people are accident-prone . . . this is a thing that's been discovered. It's like some people take to getting sick because they'd rather . . . Certainly. But not so, in your case."

"Not—?" Rosemary trembled.

"How so?" demanded the bus driver. "What did your subsconscious do? Explain it to me. Did it go up in the ether someplace and have a conference with the other fella's subconscious? He didn't have any accident either if Ethel is right. Hey? So did your subconscious say to the other subconscious, 'Look here, old chap, I'm fixing to have an accident. Is this O.K. with you? How about right now?" So the other subconscious says, 'Fine, fine. Well met. Me, too. I was fixing to have an accident, myself . . . and now is as good a time as any. So here's how we'll work it . . .' Aaah . . ." The bus driver gave an effect of spitting over the side. "Explain to me how these two subconsciouses met, there and £hen, if not accidentally? Or if you're going to say . . . well, only one of them meant to do it o . . Now you got to admit the other one anyhow had an

accident. So which one of you did ... or didn't? You or him? Hey?"

Rosemary said nothing. She knelt as if in prayer.

"Certainly," Coffey continued, "there'd be no accidents if you could know everything. But who can know everything? You can anticipate just so much. You cannot— now I don't care—you cannot always guess when who is going to do what, where. Neither you nor your subconscious, either! It's too much! There's too damned much going on in this universe. So there's going to happen what we call accidents. You see what I mean?"

"Yes," said Rosemary. "Yes, I do." She sighed deep.

"Those who skin out of having accidents are the ones who take care, who look ahead and so forth. But on top of that they better have some very snappy reflexes. See? And even they don't always skin out of all the things they meet—"

"Rosemary," said Mr. Gibson sternly. "Ethel never said this thing to you. She couldn't have told you that you deliberately hurt me."

"Not dehberately. No—but she thinks I must have meant to, because I did" Rosemary sobbed. "She keeps saying she doesn't 'blame' me. She keeps saying she 'understands.' Oh, Kenneth, I'm sorry—I wouldn't say a word against Ethel but this . . . this has been . . ."

Paul said angrily, "I told you you shouldn't pay any attention to Ethel."

"Easier said than done," said the bus driver . . . bluntly, accurately, and astonishingly.

"Doom," murmured Mr. Gibson, recovering from a stunned sensation. "Yes—doom—well. . . ."

"Now, the subconscious," said the bus driver, throwing out one hand as if he had been lecturing all along and was starting a new paragraph. "It's down there and it operates all right, something like they say. There's a little more to it. For instance, why would you want to hurt him?"

"Because—" said Rosemary indistinctly. "But it isn't true." She wiggled back up upon the seat.

"I'd say you had an accident," Lee Coffey told her. "For the love of Pete, Mike, and Maria ... I don't see the point of this Ethel!"

Rosemary was crying.

Mr. Gibson began to feel quite angry for Rosemary's sake. "Ethel isn't infallible, mouse," he said indignantly. He felt a surge of malicious mischief, too. "I've heard Ethel say, for instance, that bus drivers are perfectly ruthless brutes. Now, obviously . . ."

"What!" Lee Coffey raised his head. "Let me tell you, for your information, nobody's got more ruth than us bus drivers. Ruth's our business. It's a job, takes a mighty responsible party and no joking. You got to drive in whatever weather, whatever traffic, and on schedule, and what you meet you meet with your mind on safety first. Listen, we got more ruth than any twenty-five private drivers in this world." He was sputtering. "We can't take chances. We aren't free to. Passengers, pedestrians, school kids, nuts, drunks ... we got to look out for everybody in the world. We got to handle it, and if we do have an accident, believe me, it is an accident. What's this Ethel talking? Who is this Ethel?"

"My sister," said Mr. Gibson, tossed in the storm of this outburst, yet somehow wanting to laugh out loud, which seemed unsuitable.

"Some sister," said the bus driver gloomily.

"She came to . . . take care of us . . . after the accident ..."

"I must confess," said Paul, his syllables falling rapidly, "that we don't . . . Mama and Jeanie and I ... we just don't care too much for Ethel. She seems so cold and superior . . ."

"My sister Ethel!" said Mr. Gibson.

"Ruthless. Hey?" muttered the bus driver. "Every last one of us, hey? The whole category? 'Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men . . .' "

"You are fond of Shakespeare?" asked Mr. Gibson.

"Sure, I am. Not only his language hits the spot: his music does, too. You like Shakespeare, don't you?"

"I like Shakespeare very much," said Mr. Gibson vrith his hair rising on his head in delighted astonishment. "Do you like Browning?" he asked with strange urgency.

"Some of it. Quite a lot of it. Of course you got to get onto his system."

"He was kind of a lady's man."

"The ladies were the ones who had the time to—you know—ruminate, in a refined way," said Lee Coffey, "or

they used to before they started being riveters and tycoons."

"Just so," said Mr. Gibson almost comfortably.

Rosemary was not weeping any more. She sat with her shoulder to his. "Did you ever hear Ethel speak of a blonde?" she said demurely.

"What'd she say?" demanded the bus driver.

But Paul Townsend was fidgeting. "Look, I don't like to keep worrying," he said plaintively, "but where is this blonde? She might have the poison herself, you know. She might be in danger. She might be dead. I don't see how you can talk about Shakespeare and Browning!"

The bus driver said calmly, "She must live within four or five blocks of this next comer. What time is it?"

"Three twenty. Three twenty-two in fact."

"Yeah, well—not many take olive oil for a snack between meals."

"Oh, that's true!" cried Rosemary, clapping her hands. "We have more time than we thought."

"Maybe," said Mr. Gibson hopefully but he thought within, where a twinge—the pain of life—was creeping. But there are accidents. He felt a sweet sense of expansion, and a piercing alarm, all together.

Accidents are possible.

Chapter XVI

THERE WAS a light at the comer of Allen Street and the Boulevard. Lee Coffey turned right on Allen. Nobody said a word. Paul's car mooched down the first block: the driver seemed to be testing the very air for the scent. The car crossed one intersection. Then, in the middle of the second block on Allen, it stopped.

Lee Coffey analyzed the situation aloud. He held his head down; his eyes were roving; he spoke like a conspirator. "Her place will be on this side of Allen. Or around a comer from this side. She waits for the light on this side of Allen . . . see? If she had to cross, she'd cross at the Boulevard, see what I mean?"

Mr. Gibson, on the edge of the seat, nodded solemnly. At the same time he felt a little childish pleasure, as if this were a game.

"Now," said Lee, "the first block was all duplexes. Five- and six-room places. But these are private houses, old enough and big enough for taking in roomers." He was right. This second block was an old block. The houses stood up off the ground. Their roofs were up in the tree-tops and the trees were high—conditions not always present in the bursting newness of a California town. "I don't think she's got a lot of dough," he went on, "and I do think she lives by herself. If she had a family, somebody would have a car." This was true in California, U.S.A. "And they'd work it so she wouldn't have to take the bus as much as she does. I get a pretty good idea who rides with me, you know."

"But what can we do," said Paul, "when you don't know her name?"

"What are we going to do, Lee?" asked Rosemary confidently, eagerly. She was on the edge of the seat too.

"This is what we are going to do. We ring doorbells. We take one block at a time. Each of you ask for a blond young lady, not very tall, who is some kind of nurse. Why I say that . . . I've seen her wear white stockings. And, while lots of jobs will take a white uniform, there ain't a female on earth wears white stocking unless she has to. Now, if you find her, or any news of her, give a yell, make a noise to the rest of us. Ask if they've seen her i walking by, and if so, which way she turns. But don't tell ; why you're asking." His eye caught Mr. Gibson's wince, j "Because it would take too long," the bus driver said, j "O.K.?" i

This all seemed very logical and clear to everyone. All four of them tumbled out and were deployed. Rosemary ran back along the sidewalk to start at the beginning of the block. Paul went striding far to tlie left to begin at the end. Lee Coffey started where he was, his nostrils seeming to quiver. He had some reason, Mr. Gibson guessed, to suspect this spot, a certain house. A reason he could not or would not explain. Lee Coffey was to work to the left. Mr. Gibson took the next door and would work to the right and meet Rosemary.

He limped up the front walk of the house assigned to him and rang the bell. Nobody answered it; nobody

seemed to be at home. Mr. Gibson stood on the strange stoop and rang and rang in a dream. (He was Mr. Gibson of the English Department. No. He was crazy. No, but he was a criminal. Or he was a man in a desperate plight who had friends to fight fate for him. How could he let them down? or let them know that they were doomed? Mr. Gibson, half dead, half bom, was not sure about anything.)

He had just pulled himself together to abandon here and proceed to ring another when he heard a shrill whistle, looked, and saw Lee Coffey beckoning with huge gestures of his long arms.

Mr. Gibson's heart leaped up. He was pleased that Lee Coffey should be the one of the four of them to find the scent. He was pleased with the magic of it. It was almost enough to make you dream a man could put intelligence and intuition against odds and make progress. Which was romantic and naive, but he liked it. As he limped leftward, Rosemary was running to catch up with him and he saw Paul hurrying back.

They flocked up upon the gray porch of a neat gray frame house that made one think of New England. There was even a lilac bush . . . an exotic and difficult plant here in the West—growing beside the porch railing. In the dopr stood a small blond girl at whom Lee Coffey looked down with hidden eyes.

She was wearing a long wrapper of blue cotton. Her hair was tousled, as if it had just left a pillow. Her face W21S broad at the eyes and curved quickly into a small chin. It was an attractive little face, not conventionally pretty. The skin was smooth and fine. The mouth was 'Serious. The gray eyes were serene. The only thing ''blonde" about her, in Ethel's sense, was the color of her hair.

"And here she is," said Lee, like the Little Bear in the story.

"What is it, please?" the girl said in a self-assured voice. She wasn't a person easily surprised, one could tell. For a slim little girl, she seemed very strong.

Lee blurted, "We aren't here to accuse you, ma'am. But did you find a bottle of olive oil on a bus today? And did you bring it home?"'

"No, I didn't," said the blonde quietly.

The atmosphere of excited triumphant hope swirled and began to die down.

"Did you see," said Rosemary doggedly, "my husband . . . this man. . ." she put her hand on Mr. Gibson, "on the bus?"

"No, I didn't" said the blonde. Her eyes traveled from face to face. "Something is wrong? I remember you," she said, coming to Lee Coffey. "Aren't you the driver?" Her eyes were very clear and steady.

"Yes, ma'am." Mr. Gibson found himself waiting for Lee to tell whose blonde she was, but his sandy lashes were discreet.

She wrinkled her fair brow. "Will one of you please tell me what's the matter?"

Rosemary was the one of them who told her. When she was a quarter of the way into the exposition, the small blonde, by gestures only, brought them all inside the house. As if trouble as bad as this better not stand where the breeze might blow and communicate it. So they all sat down in the parlor, on edges of stiff sofas and chairs, while Rosemary went on.

This small blonde female had an air of calm and precision about her. She listened without making noises of alarm or even appreciation. But you knew she did appreciate and was alarmed.

"Then Lee . . . Mr. Coffey, here . . . remembered you" finished Rosemary, "and so we came. Hoping you had it. Or had seen something."

"I wouldn't have taken it, I'm sorry, even if I'd seen it. It wouldn't have occurred to me." The blonde's immaculate ringless hands clasped her knee. "I didn't see anything of a paper bag or a bottle." This serene little person had never been in danger from the missing poison.

But now there was no way to continue. They had come to an end. Magic had found the bus driver's blonde, but not the poison. It was not here.

Mr. Gibson squirmed. He found himself incorrigibly on the side of the magic. "You must tell us your name," he said impulsively. He wanted the bus driver to learn her name.

She said her name was Virginia Severson, It suited her. She looked very virginal, and clean, calm, cool in a Scandinavian sort of way. Rosemary rallied and told her all their names. Once again, the civilized ceremony of mutual introduction seemed to relax Paul Townsend. He was charming.

But all this was only delay. The stiff, shabby, spotless parlor seemed airless and stagnant.

Miss Severson said, "I sat pretty well forward in the bus. You must have been sitting behind me." Her grave eyes examined Mr. Gibson. "I'm sorry." She turned her face to Lee Coffey. "You were clever to find me," she said.

"One day," said Lee, "I saw you breathing through a lilac ..."

"Are you from the East, too?" she said warmly, "that you noticed a lilac?"

"I'll tell you another time," said the bus driver softly, "how come I noticed the lilac."

The blond girl let her lashes down. "I wish I could have helped you," she murmured.

Paul twitched. "Say, if the police have been broadcasting a warning all this time, maybe we should call . . .?"

"Call," said Rosemary with her hands clenched.

Virginia Severson showed Paul the telephone. Mr. Gibson surrendered himself to his chair; hope faded. All the magic belonged to the bus driver. The poison was still lost, still threatening.

The girl came back, biting her lips. "I am a nurse, you know," she said to them. "This . . . well, it shocks me.

"A man has his reasons," said Lee Coffey, gently. "It's easy to say he was crazy. It's also lazy."

Virginia Severson tilted her head and shot him a glance that was suddenly alert. "His reasons aren't the question, right now, are they?" she said. "I meant unlabeled poison, Mr. Coffey. Floating around. That's shocking! I'm trained to be careful with drugs."

"We'd like to find it. Miss Severson. We'd mighty like to find it," he drawled. His intent gaze was challenging.

"Of course, you would," she said. ''I would, too." She seemed to feel the force of his challenge. "Let me try to think . . ." she said soberly and sat down, pulling the long blue around her pretty feet.

Paul came back and spoke reluctantly to Rosemary's yearning face. "Nothing." He looked nervous and defeated. "Not a word. It's three thirty. Where is that stuff?"

"It's somewhere," said Rosemary with a little gasp. "Somewhere."

Mr. Gibson found himself pushing his imagination, too,

trying to picture the bottle in the green bag . . . somewhere. But where?

"Rosie, this is too tough," said Paul. "I don't think we're accomplishing anything."

"Yes, we are. Be quiet," said Lee Coffey reverently, "Virginia is thinking." The nurse smiled at him. She had a lovely smile, and the bus driver let his face look fond.

"Lee ..." said Rosemary, her voice ready to break, "Miss . . . Virginia. It's no time for . . ."

"We're not," said the bus driver quickly.

Mr. Gibson understood perfectly. But Paul Townsend didn't. His tall frame remained in the archway and his handsome face wore a lost expression as if to say. But what are you all talking about? Virginia had understood too, Mr. Gibson guessed, as her lids went down again. And Virginia agreed.

How remarkably quickly, thought Mr. Gibson, things can be communicated. Lee Coffey has told this girl he's long noticed her, has liked her looks, likes her now, and expects a good deal of her. And she has told him she is . . . not offended. She would even like to deserve his good opinion. She already knows this is an interesting man. Yet both of them resolve that they will not pursue this enchantment . . . that, first, they will help me if they can. A bus driver, he thought. A blonde. His eyes stung suddenly.

Nobody spoke. Until the little nurse said, at last, in her quiet unexcited voice, "There was somebody I know, on the bus. Would that help?"

"Oh yes, it might," cried Rosemary, jumping up. "Oh yes! Oh, good for you!"

"You see?" said Lee Coffey.

"Mrs. Boatright was on that bus," the nurse told them, getting to her feet. "Mrs. Boatright. I remember now, wondering how three or four cars could all be unavailable, at once. She had a heap of packages, too. On the bus. It seemed strange. She's so very wealthy ... at least her husband is. She lives in a huge place on the hill. I'm sure it was she. I once met her at Red Cross headquarters."

"Walter Boatright . . ." Lee Coffey sprang up and dove into the hallway and came back with the phone book.

"But I'm afraid she'd have an unlisted number," Virginia said. "In fact, I know she has."

I'Not what the number is?" The bus driver lowered the book.

"No. Sorry."

"Do you know the house?"

"Yes, but not the street number, either."

"Can't we go there?" Rosemary cried. And Paul half groaned and the bus driver looked at his blonde.

"You all start," Virginia said. She was already at a plain white door the far side of the room. "Don't wait I'll catch you at the car."

Lee Coffey grinned and glanced at his watch, and then took Mr. Gibson by one wing. "Is she a blonde?" he murmured, almost carrying Mr. Gibson down the porch steps past the lilac bush. "Do you blame me?"

"She's a lovely blonde," said Mr. Gibson, overwhehned' "This is so good of you."

"And all for money, too," said Rosemary tartly. "All for material advantage." Mr. Gibson looked at his wife, who had his other arm. Her blue eyes were bright.

"Listen, we got our teeth in it now," said Lee with enormous gusto.

"We're going to find it," said Rosemary.

Mr. Gibson could almost believe this.

Chapter XVIl

THEY STUFFED HIM into the tonneau and Rosemary sprang in, too. She shoved over, and Lee Coffey, using nothing but an air of expectancy, stuffed Paul Town-send in at the other side of Rosemary. Then he slipped into the driver's seat and turned the key. The motor caught. The door of the house opened. Virginia skipped down the walk, wearing a brown jumper over a white blouse, brown pumps on her bare feet; her blond hair was neat and shining. The bus driver grinned and let the car move just as she slipped in beside him. He had not waited even one-tenth of a second. She had not failed him either. Paul said admiringly, "That was a quick change!" Nobody paid any attention to him. It would have been better not to have commented.

As the car moved, the little nurse began to describe the location of the house they were seeking, and Lee sent them spinning around the block, across the Boulevard, and on north. They were heading for a swelling slope in the northwest section of the town where lawns grew wider and houses larger as they stood higher on the hill. Mrs. Boatright's house, she said, would be close to the top, on a short street, where there were only three or four houses, and hers had vast lawns behind a wall.

"The higher the fewer, I guess," said Paul.

Virginia turned to look back. "Is there an antidote to this poison, Mr. Townsend?" she said in a professional kind of way.

"Paul," he suggested.

She smiled at hrni. "What ought to be done ... in case . . . ?"

"I'm afraid I don't know of any antidote," Paul confessed, sliding forward in the seat, the other side of Rosemary. "Of course I'm no doctor. All we understand, in our business, is what the danger is. We're trained to be careful, too."

"How did he ever get hold of it?" the nurse frowned.

Paul told her. As Mr. Gibson listened, he began to know that Paul Townsend was projecting himself somehow and being quite skillfully charming to this most attractive little person. Mr. Gibson found himself curiously affronted.

He looked at Rosemary, dear Rosemary, who sat still between them with her hands clenched . . . whose resolution was their strength, who had begun this fight and fired them all from her own spirit and collected these valiant lieutenants.

He said, "What a fighter you are, Rosemary!"

"I am a rabbit," she said bitterly. "I was always a rabbit. I should have begun to fight long, long ago."

Paul turned and covered her tense hands with one of his. "Now, now, Rosie ... try to take it easy. You'll make yourself sick. Worry doesn't tiflp any, does it, Virginia?"

The nurse did not answer. The bus driver said, "She's getting a lot of mileage out of her worry. Hey, Rosemary?''

"Yes, thank you," said Rosemary, rather forlornly, collapsing a little from her rigidity. Paul took his hand away. "I'm worrying now," she said, "trying to imagine a wealthy

woman picking up a strange package on a public bus. I don't suppose she would."

"She might," said the nurse brightly. "By mistake, you see? Suppose she gathered it up with the other packages she was carrying. I didn't see her get off. I got off first. But who can say? And suppose she had things to eat in her own packages? She might dump them all in the kitchen. And she surely has servants. Her cook, for instance, wouldn't know. Her cook might think Mrs. Boat-right had meant to bring home some olive oil."

"A little bottle?" said Rosemary pathetically. "A very small quantity? What time is it?"

"Three thirty-seven," Paul told her.

"It's still early, anyhow," said Rosemary, with a desperate smile.

But Mr. Gibson thought, It's late. He thought of time gone by. Time enough for someone to have died already and very mysteriously, too. So that the news of the result might not yet have caught up with the cause. This fight might already have been lost, for all they knew.

"The Boatright kids are in their teens," said the nurse thoughtfully. "They certainly wouldn't be fed their supper this early."

"Olive oil?" said Rosemary. "What would a cook do with it?"

The nurse said, "Salad? Oh ... to moisten a sandwich filling . . . possibly for a snack . . ."

"Don't say that!" said Paul.

The nurse said, "I guess I'm helping her worry."

". . . Resembles thought," muttered the bus driver.

But Mr. Gibson was appalled. A child! Oh, if a child were to get the poison! He said aloud, "All of you ought to leave me. You are very good to trouble yourselves—"

"No trouble," said Virginia. Mr. Gibson discovered that he believed her. "I believe you," he said to her in surprise and she smiled.

"Don't worry," Paul began.

"Stop saying that," said Rosemary quietly. "It doesn't help, Paul."

"I told you, Rosie," he said rather crossly, "you ought to have talked to him, laid things on the line . . ."

"You did. You told me. You were right," said Rosemary, looking straight ahead. "Yes, Paul." Her hands twitched.

"You musta seen something brewing, Rosemary," the bus driver said sympathetically, not quite understanding. He hadn't the background. "A man doesn't decide in a day."

(But I did, mused Mr. Gibson, wonderingly. In a night. I seemed to.)

"Have you been ill, Mr. Gibson?" the nurse asked, "or taking drugs for pain? I see you limping."

Mr. Gibson was bewildered. (His heart hurt. He wasn't dead at all.) "A broken bone or two," he murmured. "Just an accident." Rosemary turned her face to look at his. He looked away.

"I only wondered," said Virginia gently. "There are illnesses that can be very depressing. And some drugs, too."

Mr. Gibson, gazing at a curb whizzing by, thought Doom, yes. Here comes doom, again.

"I was depressed," he said without spirit. "That's a name for it."

"If you had only seen a doctor," the nurse scolded him delicately, with her soft regret. "So often a doctor can help these depressed feelings."

"By a little tinkering in the machinery?" said Mr. Gibson rather bitterly.

"They do know how to help sometimes," the nurse said, rather mechanically. She seemed to be tasting, perhaps diagnosing this answer.

"You go for this psychosomatic stuff?" inquired the bus driver abruptly.

"Don't you?" she said.

"Long ago," he declaimed, "long ago I threw a whole bunch of arbitrary distinctions outa my head. Either—or. Body or mind. Matter or spirit. Hah! Now it turns out matter is less solid than spirit, far as I can figure what they're talking. Nothing's any more un-gross than the human body. Or a chair, either. Zillions of cells—atoms and subdivisions of same—whizzing around, and . . . they made outa what? Waves. Rhythms. Time itself, for all we know. Caution to the jaybirds," he concluded.

Virginia laughed out loud, delightedly.

But Mr. Gibson was on his way down for the second time. Doom, he said to himself, and aloud, "I suppose I was ill. At least that's a name for what I was."

''NowI' said Virginia. "Look, we are so ignorant."

"Yes, we are ignorantI' said Rosemary gladly.

"Anybody who knows anything at all about medical science—or any other, I guess—only begins to know how ignorant we are," said Virginia. She looked brightly back at Mr. Gibson. She expected him to be glad.

"Where there's life there's hope, you mean?" said PauL He seemed to think he was joining in.

The nurse frowned. Her small chin was almost resting upon the back of the front seat as she sat twisted around to talk to them. "I meant we know enough to know there's an awful lot more to be found out. We do know just a little bit about how to find it. Don't you see, Mr. Gibson? There are people looking for ways to help all the time and they've found some. I've seen. Nobody knows what they might find out by tomorrow morning. You should have asked for help," she chided.

"So should I," said Rosemary not very loudly.

Mr. Gibson didn't reply. He was busy perceiving something odd. It was hard to fit into the structure of doom. That was what was odd about it. Say the individual is depressed because of his internal chemistry, call it his machinery. Even so. He is not quite doomed . . . not if his fellow men, men who hold their minds open because they humbly know their ignorance . . . not if these have discovered even some helpful things to do for him. And this was strange, a strange weakness—wasn't it?—in the huge hard jaws of doom.

"That's funny," he said aloud.

Nobody asked him what he meant and he did not tell. The car slid up a tree-lined street and all the passengers were silent for a block.

Then Paul fidgeted. "I should have called home. I wonder if Jeanie got back . . . and Mama's O.K."

"It must be nearly four o'clock," said Rosemary. "Ethel will be home." She lifted her head; it was almost as if she tossed it haughtily.

Ethel! Gibson felt shocked. What would Ethel say? He couldn't even imagine. Absolutely nothing that had happened since eleven o'clock this morning had made Ethel's kind of sense.

"I don't think he was ill," the bus driver blurted. '7 think he was shook."

Virginia tilted her head to look at him respectfully.

"To his foundations," said the bus driver.

"But everybody loved him," said Rosemary, and raised her clenched hands like a desperate prayer.

"Why sure, everybody thought a hell of a lot of Gibson," said Paul indignantly, as if Mr. Gibson had offended un-pardonably.

"Everybody?" said the bus driver nmiinatively. "Now, let's not promise candy."

"Candy?" said the nurse with curiosity.

"He had something on his mind; it wasn't hardly just missing the brotherly love of his fellow man," said Lee. "Hey? And look, honeybunch," he said to his blonde, "we are now on Hathaway Drive, so where's this mansion?"

"It's the white Colonial," said Virginia.

Rosemary said, "Maybe the poison is here."

Mr. Gibson was a chip in a current. He got out of the car with all the rest of them.

They had pulled up within the wall, in the wide spot where the drive curved before the pillared entrance. The wide and spanking-white facade looked down upon them, and all the exquisite ruffles of the dainty window curtains announced that here money, and many hired hands, made order.

' Now Virginia took the lead. She rang the bell. A maidservant opened the door. "Is Mrs. Boatright here? We must see her quickly. It's very important." Virginia's crisp grave manner was impressive.

The maid said, "Come in, please," looking as unsurprised as she was able. She left them standing on the oriental rug of the wide foyer. To their left was a huge room. A pair of saddle oxfords hung over the arm of a gray-and-yellow couch, which shoes wiggled, being attached to a pair of young feet. There must be a girl, flat on her back on the sofa. She was talking. There was no one else in there. She must be talking on the telephone.

A boy, about sixteen years old, came in a jumping gallop down the broad stairs. "Oh, hi!" said he, and romped off to their right, where there was another room, and a lot of books and a piano. The boy snatched up a horn and they heard some melancholy toots receding.

Then Mrs. Walter Boatright, in person, sailed out of a white door under the stairs. She was about five and a half feet tall and about two and a half feet wide. Every

ounce under the beige-cotton-and-white-lace was firm. She had short white hair, nicely waved, and a thin nose made a prow for the well-fleshed face. Her eyes were blue (although not so blue as Rosemary's) and they were simply interested. "Yes? Oh, Miss Severson. How do you do?"

Virginia gave a little start at being called her own name, but she omitted any more preliminaries. "I saw you on a bus, today, ma'am ..."

"I'm so sorry," cut in Mrs. Boatright, her words mechanical, while her eyes still inquired and expected. "Had I seen you my dear . . ."

The little nurse brushed this aside. "Please. Did you pick up a small green paper bag by mistake?"

"I doubt it," said Mrs. Boatright, accepting the abrupt manner as urgency without showing a ripple in her poise. "Now shall we just see?" She turned. Her bulk moved with surprising ease and grace. "Mona."

Mona turned out to be the maid.

"Ask Geraldine if I brought in a small green paper bagi"

"Yes, Mrs. Boatright."

"What is in the bag?" inquired the lady of the house of her callers.

Virginia told her.

Mrs. Boatright compressed her lips. "Yes, I see. This is serious," said she. "Dell." The girl on the phone bobbed up, using the muscles at her waist, and said, "Hold on a sec, Christy. Yes, Ma?"

"Put up the phone," said Mrs. Boatright. "We'll need it. Get Tom. Tell him to search his car carefully for a small green paper bag with a bottle in it."

"Yes, Ma. . . . Call you back, Christy. Bye now."

"My son picked me up at the bus stop," said Mrs. Boatright in explanation, meanwhile saiHng toward the phone.

The girl, Dell, who was perhaps eighteen, went across before them in a gait like dancing. Her eyes were curious but smiling.

A woman in a blue uniform came out of the white door. "No ma'am," said she. "No green paper bag in the kitchen at all."

"Thank you, Geraldine," said Mrs, Boatright and then into the phone, "The police, if you please?" She said to the five of them, who all stood speechless watching her operate, "Which of you is Mr. Gibson?"

Mr. Gibson felt himself being pointed out from all sides. He stood in a dream, not miserable enough, but rather guiltily fascinated.

"Police?" said Mrs. Boaright. "Has the poison in the olive oil been located yet? . . . Thank you." Mrs. Boat-right put the phone up and wasted no more time than she had words. "Not yet," she said. "Yes, you were on the bus with me. Now, what can I do?"

"It's been a chain," said Rosemary, quivering between disappointment and hope. "The driver remembered her. She remembered you."

"And I," said Mrs. Boatright (who had not yet said "Oh dear" or "How terrible") "remember Theo Marsh." She nodded and held them in order with a kind of invisible gavel. "But, first, let's be sure."

"Not a thing in my car. Ma," said the boy, Tom, reappearing. He looked at the group with curiosity but did not ask questions.

"Who . . . ?"

"Marsh?"

"Where...?"

Mrs. Boatright rapped the air for order. "The only way to reach Theo Marsh that I know of," said she, "is to drive out there. He has no phone in his studio. The man isolates himself to work." She saw their ignorance. "He is the painter, of course."

"Where is this studio?" asked Lee and added, "ma-dame?"

"Can I describe it to the police, I wonder?" Mrs. Boat-right gathered her brows.

"Can't we go?" said Rosemary. "We've abready been so far. It's better than waiting . . ."

"Might be quicker," Lee said, "Surer."

Mrs. Boatright said, "As a matter of fact, it might be wiser. Theo Marsh might, just whimsically, lie low and refuse to admit a policeman. But he knows me." One felt nobody could lie low, if Mrs. Boatright chose otherwise. "Now," the lady turned lightly on her heel, "both Cadillacs are at the garage and won't be available 'til six o'clock. Walter was forced to take Dell's car. It seems, Tom, we must use yours."

The boy looked as dashed as if his mother had proposed removing his trousers to lend them to a tramp.

"We have a car, madame," the bus driver said, his

sandy lashes somehow admiring her, "and there's still half a tank of gas in her."

"And an excellent driver," Virginia said.

"Very well," said Mrs. Boatright. "Mona, bring me my tan jacket, please, and my bag." She made another of her swift turns. "Meantime, Tom, search the house for a bottle of olive oil in a green paper bag. By no means touch the contents. It is poison. Geraldine, serve dinner at six-thirty; I may be late. Dell . . ." (The girl was back.) "Call your father. Say I am called away. At seven, if I am not here, call Mr. Coster of the Board of Education and say I am unavoidably detained. Call Mrs. Peters and tell her I may not have the lists for her until tomorrow. Apologize." She took her jacket from the hands of the maid who had hopped to do as she was bidden. "Let's go," said Mrs. Walter Boatright. She sailed out of her front door and the five of them straggled along in her wake.

The bus driver got under the wheel and tucked his blonde beside him and Paul got into the right front seat.

Mrs. Boatright let Rosemary go first into the tonneau while she turned and said to her son, "Keep Dell off the phone. I may call."

"Gosh, Ma, give me something easy," the boy said.

His mother flipped her hand farewell and she got in and Mr. Gibson, last, beside her.

"Where to?" said the bus driver respectfully.

"Go out the Boulevard," said Mrs. Boatright, "all the way to the end of the bus line. Theo Marsh has a studio in the country. Quite a hideaway. But I believe I know the turn. If not, we can inquire at the junction."

The car was moving already.

"I don't just remember anybody who looked like a painter" Lee said, "getting off the end of the line. You mean, a fine-art-type painter?"

"If he got off sooner," said Mrs. Boatright, "we cannot know where he was heading, and there is no use wondering about it. We must go on what we know."

"Sure thing," said Lee. "That's abso-tootly right."

"Very rustic, that studio," Mrs. Boatright continued. "The man's a fine painter, yes. But I'm just afraid . . ."

"Afraid?" Rosemary's voice sounded tired. Mr. Gibson couldn't see her now. Not with Mrs. Boatright in the middle.

"If Theo Marsh, of all people, found a bottle of olive oil on a bus ... I assume it was imported?"

"Yes," said Mr. Gibson.

''He would accept it joyously, as a gift from the gods, and he, and that model of his, would add it to some feast or other with no hesitation. What a loss it would be!" said Mrs. Boatright. "A fine artist! We can't spare them."

"What time is it?" asked Rosemary tensely.

"Only four o'clock . . . just about one minute after," Paul told them. "Too early for supper."

"Alas," said Mrs. Boatright, "I imagine Theo Marsh will eat when he is hungry .1 doubt if the man has names for meals."

"Is it very far?" asked Rosemary pathetically.

"Thirty minutes," promised Lee Coffey. "Do I know that boulevard!"

The car picked up its heels and scooted rapidly down curving streets.

"Now what's all this," said Mrs. Boatright severely, "about suicide?"

Mr. Gibson put his hand over his eyes.

"Ever since Ethel came," said Rosemary passionately. "Ever since she came! I don't know what she's done to him. I was too upset by what she did to me."

"You are his wife, my dear?"

"Yes, I am," said Rosemary as defiantly as if somebody else had claimed the title.

"And our driver is the driver of the bus, is he not?" Mrs. Boatright was proceeding with order, ignoring outbursts. "And the other gentleman?"

"I am their neighbor," said Paul. "Townsend is my name."

"And our friend," said Rosemary with a forced sweetness as if she were struggling to keep polite and calm.

''And Miss Severson was a passenger?" Mrs. Boatright sailed right on, "Does anyone remember the tale of the Golden Goose?"

"Hey!" said the bus driver. "Sure, I remember. Everybody who takes ahold has to tag along. That's pretty good, Mrs. Boatright." I

"But who is Ethel?" Mrs. Boatright had come around | a curve and would have all clear.

"Ethel," said Rosemary in a desperately even tone, "is Kenneth's sister, a good woman, a fine person, who came

here to help and to take care of us, after we had an accident . . ." Her voice rose. "I shouldn't have said what I did. But I can't—I cannot be grateful any more. It's no time to be grateful. It just doesn't count any more." The strain was telling and Rosemary began to cry. "This terrible trouble and it's getting late and I'd so hate it to be an artist . . . way out in the country and no help near-by ..."

Mr. Gibsqn, too, could see, ahead of them, a rustic studio strewn with bodies.

"There wouldn't be much help," said Paul miserably. ''That stuff works fast."

"Now, we'll see, when we get there," said Mrs. Boat-right, "and not before. Mr. Coffey is making the best possible time. We are doing the best possible thing." "It's so long . . ." wept Rosemary. So Mrs. Boatright, who was in equal parts mother and commanding officer, took Rosemary to her bosom and began to stroke her hair. Mr. Gibson felt a tremendous relief. He blessed Mrs. Boatright. The three heads in the front seat were still, facing forward.

"Gratitude," said the bus driver suddenly, "is for the birds. There's all kinds of ins and outs to this, Mrs. Boat-right, and we don't know the half of them. But this Ethel —see, Mrs. Boatright?—she puts it into Rosemary's head that Rosemary meant to get him smashed up in an auto accident, which is why he is limping, did you notice? Well, this Ethel, she's got poor Rosemary feeling guilty as hell because she was driving at the time, although it was a pure and simple accident . . . but this Ethel she's the kind who knows better than you do what your real motives were, see? And Rosemary thinks she shouldn't get mad at Ethel, because this Ethel shows up to help and all and besides this Ethel is her sister-in-law and I don't guess Rosemary likes squabbling with the relatives. Some people thrive on that. Hey? Some people make a career out of it." "I see. I see," said Mrs. Boatright, stopping his flow. "Had you seen much of this sister-in-law before?" "Never," wailed Rosemary.

"Let her cry," said Virginia. "Cry hard, Rosemary." Paul squirmed. "Look . . . she can't take much more of this . . ."

"It's high time she bawled her head off," the nurse said fiercely. "And Mr. Gibson, too."

But Mr. Gibson sat, dry-eyed and amazed.

"I'm sorry . . ." sobbed Rosemary. "It isn't really Ethel, herself. I know that. But it's her ideas. It's the way she thinks. And what can you do? I know I'm a rabbit but, even if you aren't a rabbit, how can you fight that kind of thing? I've told myself . . . I've told her ... I couldn't have meant it. But the idea is, I wouldn't know if I had! I'd be the last to know! And how can you argue with somebody who just turns everything you say around? Who just makes you feel as if every time you opened your mouth you were giving some horrible inner beastly self away? If you insist, she thinks Aha, you protest too much! So you must really mean the exact opposite. If you talk loud, because you feel so strongly that you're right . . . why, a loud voice means you must be trying to sell yourself a lie. It's maddening," said Rosemary. "You can't know anything. You can't trust yourself, at all."

Doomed, said Mr. Gibson in his throat or his mind. Nobody seemed to hear him.

"What I'd like to know," said Lee Coffey angrily, "is who gives this Ethel her license to read minds. Hey? Fd give Rosemary a fifty-fifty chance to know, as well as Ethel, what Rosemary means by what she says."

"No, you can't," wept Rosemary. "You're the last. That's the paralyzing thing!"

The nurse said some angry syllable under her breath. The driver's head agreed savagely.

"Gratitude," said Mrs. Boatright, rhythmically stroking Rosemary's hair with one plump jeweled hand, "lasts on, for a time, after the deed that caused it. But it's like a fire, don't you think so? It's lit, it bums, it's warm. But it nepds fuel. It doesn't last forever unless it's fed."

Mrs. Boatright was making a speech. She had a clear voice and she knew how to breathe and she could be rather eloquent. Even Rosemary -stopped her weeping noises to listen.

"No one should be the prisoner of stale gratitude—to change and also mix the metaphor" declaimed Mrs. Boat- : right. "I think of the children in this world, enslaved by parents trading on gratitude for old deeds that should have been done for love only in the first place. I think of parents who have become, in fact, whining nuisances thatJ flesh-and-blood rightfully resents and yet blood, that is thicker than water, scourges itself for resenting. I shudder

at SO much unhappiness. Gratitude can be a dreadful thing when it becomes a debt—you see?—and there is guilt and reluctance. But if, by continued feeding, faith is created, and mutual respect is accumulated and confidence grows, in love, in friendship, then gratitude turns into something better. And something durable." She paused and one expected the pattering of ladies' hands over the luncheon tables. Here was only the rushing sound of the car, and Rosemary saying, "I know ..." in a choking voice.

"If parents, for instance," said Mrs. Boatright, wistfully, in a more private kind of voice, "could only grow up to be their children's friends . . . Have you children, my dear?"

Paul said hastily, almost in alarm. "They've only been married . . . less than three months . . ."

There was a silence, deep . . . except for the sounds of the car's progress.

Lee Coffey said in a moment, "Is that so? I didn't know that."

"A bride and a groom," said Virginia slowly, her voice caressing the words sadly.

The news was sinking into the fabric of all their speculations, dyeing everything to different colors. Mr. Gibson felt like crying out. No, you don't understand. It was only a silly, unrealistic arrangement. And I am fifty-five. She is thirty-two. It leaves twenty-three.

He cried out nothing.

Mrs. Boatright turned and said to him, "Rosemary finds your sister difficult. Rosemary has been unhappy. But Rosemary wasn't the one who stole the poison, was she?"

"No," he said. "No."

"Then what was the matter with you?" she asked.

He couldn't answer.

Paul turned around. "You certainly raised the devil," he said. "You might have been a little bit thoughtful of Rosie at least. And Ethel. And mey for that matter. If you'd thought of others and not yourself . . ."

"He does think of others," said Rosemary faintly.

"Not today, he didn't," said Paul, "and what he did was a sin." He jerked his head to look forward. The back of his neck was righteous and furious.

" 'Oh . . . that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter . . .' " crooned the bus driver. "That's what you mean, hey?"

"You know what I mean."

"Yes, but that's our culture," said the bus driver. "You take Japan ..."

"You take Japan," said Paul, sulkily.

Mrs. Boatright, who had a way of going back and clearing up one thing at a time, said, "I serve with the Red Cross, the Board of Education, the Society for the Encouragement of the U.N., the Council for Juvenile Welfare, the American Women for Political Housecleaning, and the church, of course, and I work in these groups. But noj for 'others.' Isn't this my world? And while I am here, my business?" She conquered her oratorical impulses. "There is a weakness about that word 'others,' " she said privately, "and I never have liked it."

"It's not definitive," snapped Virginia, "Show me one patient. An other."

"The odds ain't good," said Lee Coffey ruminatively. "Couple of billion 'others'; only one of you. You can't take an interest, except pretty vague and slightly phony, in the whole caboodle of 'em."

"Quite so," said Mrs. Boatright genially. "You can only start from where you are."

"Although once you get into this business," said Virginia softly, "you are led on."

"One thing comes .after another," agreed the bus driver, and the nurse looked at him, with that quick alert tilt of her head again.

"Do you get paid, Mrs. Boatright?" said Rosemary, straightening up suddenly.

"Of course not." Mrs. Boatright was scandalized.

"You see? She's just a parasite," said Rosemary, half hysterically.

"Hey!" crowed Lee Coffey. "That sounds like good old Ethel to me. Ethel says any dame whose old man has got dough is just a parasite? I'll betcha she does. So she never met a high-powered executive like Mrs. B. I'm telling you, this Ethel has got everything bass-ackward. Hey, what was it she said about blondes? You never did tell me

"Blondes," said Rosemary clearly, "are predatory nitwits."

"Are-ent they, though?" said Lee to his nurse fondly. "Aren't they just? All of 'em. This means you, too, honey-bunch. You and your definitive, your patient." He chuckled. "Oh boy, you know, that's Ethel's trouble, right

it-1

there? She starts out with 'some,' slides into 'many,' and don't notice herself skidding right off the rails into 'all.' "

"Ethel's a pain in the neck," said Paul grumpily. "I told you, Rosie, the day she sent you into a fit—"

"Ethel," put in Mrs. Boatright thoughtfully, "is beginning to sound like a scapegoat."

Mr. Gibson stirred himself and said rather sharply, "Yes. And you are all so very kind to be pro-me; I can't think why. . . . But I'd like to get this straight, please. I stole the poison. I meant to die. I stupidly, criminally, left it on the bus. I am responsible, guilty, wrong, and totally to blame." He knew this to be true.

"Yes," said the bus driver in a moment, thoughtfuly, "when you come right down to it, sure you are."

But Mr. Gibson was thinking dizzily . . . Yes, but if I am to blame, there was freedom. I could have done otherwise. Without freedom, there is no blame. And vice versa. His brain swam. I don't know, he thought. I thought I knew but I don't know.

"Not a lot of use in blame, though," the bus driver was saying. "It shouldn't linger. You shouldn't blow on them ashes, hey, Mrs. B.?"

"Make a note of an error," said that matron briskly, "for future reference . . . but file it. Now, RosemIary, powder your nose and put on some lipstick and brace up. Theo Marsh may very well be lost in some masterpiece with the thought of nourishment far, far from his mind. It would be quite like him."

"I haven't got a lipstick," wailed Rosemary.

"Use mine," said Virginia warmly.

"Put a good face on it, girls," said the bus driver tolerantly. "A man, he takes a shave . . ."

Mr. Gibson saw Paul Townsend rubbing his jaw.

The whole thing struck him. The six of them, this heterogeneous crew, hurtling out into the country on a guess and a prayer, and conversing so fantastically.

Mr. Gibson heard a rusty chuckle coming out of him. "You know," he said, "this is remarkable?"

Not a one of them agreed. He felt all their eyes, Lee's in the rear-vision miror, Virginia's and Paul's turning back, Mrs. Boatright's at his side, Rosemary peering around her. All the eyes said, What do you mean? Not at all!

"Are we getting there?" said Rosemary.

''We are," said Mrs. Boatright

When they passed the place where the yellow bus had been left, on the road's shoulder, it was gone. Lee said, "Hey, I wonder am I fired?" No one could tell him, and since he had sounded merely, and rather merrily, curious to know, no one tried to console him, either.

After a while Mrs. Boatright said, "It's a dirt road. Going off to the right a few yards beyond the junction. The house is wood, stained brown, and it sits on a knoll."

"I can see a house like that," said Virginia. "Look. Is that it? Up there?"

Chapter XVIll

THE LOW STRUCTURE ou the high knoll looked not only rustic but abandoned. The front wall was blank. Weeds grew up to the doorstep. On a narrow terrace of old brick, overrun by wild grass, a few dilapidated redwood outdoor chairs sat at careless angles, their cushions faded and torn. A cat leaped out of one of these and fled into the wilderness.

No sound, no sign of life came from this building.

Mrs. Boatright rapped smartly.

Without sound, the door swung inward. They could see directly into a huge room and the north and opposite wall was glass, so that this space was flooded with clear and steady light. The first thing Mr. Gibson saw was a body.

The body was that of a female in a long flaring skirt of royal blue and nothing else. It was lying on a headless couch. As he blinked his dazzled eyes, it sat up. The naked torso writhed. It was alive.

A man's living voice said, "What have we here? Mary Anne Boatright! Well! Is this a club?"

The torso was pulling on a loose white T-shirt, slightly ' ragged at the shoulder seams. It went strangely with the rich silk of the skirt and the skirt's gold-embroidered hem.

"This is important," said Mrs. Boatright, "or I wouldn't disturb you, Theo."

"I should hope it is," said the voice. "It better be. Never mind. I'm tired. I just decided. Put your shirt on, Lavinia."

"I didj already," said the girl or woman on the couch

who was sitting there like a Imnpj now. She turned her

bare feet until they rested pigeon-toed, one over the other.

Her eyes were huge and dark and placid as a cow's.

Mr. Gibson tore his gaze away from her to see this man.

"Theodore Marsh," said Mrs. Boatright formally, but rapidly. "This is Mrs. Gibson, Miss Severson, Mr. Gibson, Mr. Townsend, Mr. Coffey."

"You don't look like a club," said the painter. "What are you? I've surely seen several of you before, somewhere."

He was tall and skinny as a scarecrow. He wore tweed trousers, a pink shirt, and a black vest. His hair was pure white and it looked as if it had never been brushed but remained in a state of nature, like fur. His face was wizened and shrewd, his hands knobby. He must have been seventy.

He was full of energy. He moved, flipperty-flop, all angles, beckoning them in. He had yellow teeth, all but three, which were too white to match the rest, and obviously false. His grin made one think of an ear of com peculiarly both white and golden. He certainly had not been poisoned.

"Did you find a bottle of olive oil?" Rosemary attacked in a rush.

"Not I. Sit," he said. "Explain."

Mr. Gibson sat down, feeling weak and breathless. The nurse and the bus driver sat down, side by side. Paul remained standing, for his manners. His eyes avoided the sight of the model's bare feet.

Mrs. Boatright, standing, her corsets firm, told the painter the story succinctly and efficiently. Rosemary, by her side, punctuated all she said with wordless gestures of anxiety.

Theo Marsh subdued his energy long enough to listen quickly, somehow. He got the situation into his mind, whole and fast.

"Yes, I was on a bus. Took it in front of the public library late this morning. You the driver? I did not study your face."

"Few do." Lee shrugged.

"Can you help us?" interrupted Rosemary impatiently. "Did you see a green paper bag, Mr. Marsh? Or did you see who took it?"

The artist took his gaze off the bus driver and put it upon Rosemary. He leaned his head sharply to the right

as if to see how she would look upside down. "I may have seen it," he said calmly. "J see a lot. I'll tell you, in a minute. Let me get the pictures back."

Mrs. Boatright took a throne. At least she deposited her weight upon a chair so regally that it might as well have been one.

"You, with the worries and the graceful backbone," the painter said, "sit down. And don't wiggle. I despise vviggling women. I must not be distracted, mind."

Rosemary sat down in the only remaining place, on the couch beside the model. She sat . . . and her spine was graceful ... as still as a mouse.

(Mouse, thought Mr. Gibson. Oh, how have we come here, you and I, who surely meant no harm?)

Six of them, plus the model Lavinia, all stared solemnly at Theo Marsh. He enjoyed this. He didn't seat himself. He moved, fiippety-fiop, all elbows and angles, up and down.

"G-green," stammered Mr. Gibson.

"Green?" the painter sneered. "Look out the window."

Mr. Gibson looked, blinked, said, "Yes?"

"There are at least thirty-five different and distinct greens framed there. I know. I counted. I put them on canvas. So tell me, what color was the bag?"

"It was a kind of . . ." said Mr. Gibson feebly. "—well, greenish . . ."

"They have eyes and see not," mourned the painter. "All right." He began to act like a machine gun, shooting words.

"Pine green?"

"No."

"Yellow green? Chartreuse? You've heard of that?"

"No. It wasn't—"

"Grass green?"

"No."

"Kelly green?"

"Theo," said Mrs. Boatright wamingly.

"Am I showing off, Mary Anne?" The painter grinned.

"Yes," said Mrs. Boatright.

"Well then, truce to that." The painter shrugged. "Well then, gray green?"

"Y-yes," said Mr. Gibson, struggling. "Palish, dullish . . ."

"In other words, paper-bag green," said the painter, amiably. "Of course." He rambled to the left and stopped still and looked blind. "I sat on the left side of the bus," he said dreamily. "For the first ten minutes I examined a hat. What blossoms! Watermelon shade. Nine petals, which is W7Zlikely. Well, to proceed. I saw you . . . the man there with the good eyes. That can't tell one green from another."

"Me?" squeaked Mr. Gibson.

"A man of sorrows, thought I," the painter continued. "Oh yes, you did have in your left hand a gray-green paper bag."

Mr. Gibson began to tremble.

"I watched you a while. How I envied you your youth and your sorrow! I said to myself, this man is really liv-ing!"

Mr. Gibson thought one of them must have gone mad!

The artist's eyes sHd under half-drawn lids. "I saw you put the paper bag down on the seat." The eyes were nearly closed now, and yet watched. "You took a small black-covered notebook out of your pocket . . ."

"I . . . did?"

"You produced a gold ball-point pen, about five inches long, and you wrote—brooded—wrote . . ."

"I did!" Mr. Gibson began to feel all his pockets.

"Then you got to brooding so bad you forgot to write. I lost interest. Nothing more to see, you know. Besides, I discovered an ear without a lobe, two seats ahead of me.

Rosemary had jumped up. She stood over Mr. Gibson as he drew his little pocket notebook out and flipped the pages. Yes, pen marks. He looked at what he had written on the bus. "Rosemary . . . Rosemary . . , Rosemary." Nothing but her name three times. That was all.

"Trying ... a letter to you," he stammered, and looked

up.

Rosemary's eyes were enigmatic . . . perhaps sad. She shook her head slightly, walked slowly back to the couch and sat down. Lavinia changed her feet, and put the top one underneath.

"I saw you, Mary Anne," the painter said, "and pretended not. I lay low. Forgive me, but I didn't want to be snared and exhibited."

"I saw you, you know." said Mrs. Boatright calmly, "or we wouldn't be here. Had nowhere to exhibit you, profitably, at the moment."

"You lay low?" The painter sighed. "Ships in the night. I am a vain man, amn't I? Well, let's see. Let's see.

"The paper bag?" pressed Rosemary.

"Quiet, now," the painter's eyes roved. "Ah yes, the heart-shaped face. Saw you."

"Me?" said Virginia.

"On the right side, well forward?"

"Yes."

"Where you could turn those gentle eyes where you liked," said the painter, mischievously.

Virginia's face turned a deep soft pink. Lee Coffey's ears stood up.

"I didn't try to see whether he was looking sly at you. Perhaps in the mirror?" said the painter and swung to the driver. ''Were you?"

"Me!" exploded Lee, and then softly, "Me?"

"Theo," said Mrs. Boatright severely, "you are showing off again. And behaving like a bad little boy."

"I don't care to have her embarrassed," said the bus driver stiffly. "Got on to the subject, the poison."

The painter flapped both hands. "Don't mind me," he said irritably. "I see things. I can't help it." (The bus driver picked up the nurse's hand in his, although neither of them seemed aware of this or looked at each other.) The painter clasped his hands behind him and arched his thin ribcase and teetered on his toes. "There was that ear ..."

''Whose ear?" demanded Rosemary fiercely.

"Can't say. All I noticed was the ear. We could advertise. Wait a minute . . . Didn't Mary Anne say your name is Gibson?"

"Yes."

"Then somebody spoke to you."

"Did they? Why, yes," said Mr. Gibson. "Yes, that's true. Somebody said my name, twice. Once while I waited. Once, just as I was getting off. Somebody knew me" He was suddenly excited.

"Who, Kenneth? Who?"

He shook his head. "I . . . don't know," he said with shame. "I paid no attention."

"He was sunk," said the painter nodding vigorously, looking like a turkey cock, his wattles shaking. "He was sunk. I noticed that."

"Did you notice who spoke to him?" Rosemary demanded.

The painter looked dashed. "Darned if I did," he said with chagrin. "I'm so eye-minded. Oh, I heard. But I made no picture of the speaker. I did not connect. However ..." He paused in vanity until all of them were waiting on him. "I believe I did see somebody pick up the paper bag."

"Who?"

"Who?"

"Who?"

They exploded like popcorn.

"A young woman. A mere girl. A very handsome young female," the painter said. "I was looking at her face. But I do believe she picked up that greenish paper bag and carried it off the bus. Yes."

"When?"

"After he got off, just after. I was driven back to the ear by default."

"Who was she?"

The painter shrugged. "I'd know her," he said, "but I'd have to see her. Names, labels, mean nothing to me."

"Where did she get off?"

"Oh, not many blocks after . . ." Distance meant nothing to him, either.

"Was she dark?" said Paul Townsend, tensely.

"I suppose you mean ... to put it, crudely . . . was her hair of a darkish color? Yes."

"Jeanie! cried Paul. "Oh Lord, oh God, it could have been Jeanie. Where's your telephone?"

"No telephone," said Mrs. Boatright. "Who is Jeanie?"

Paul had moved into the center somehow. He was tall and angry. He glared at everyone. He was a raging lion.

"But Paul," said Rosemary, "what makes you think it could be Jeanie?"

"Because she went to her music lesson, just about then. Her teacher is out on the Boulevard. She could have got on as he got off. She knew him. She would have spoken. She might have taken his empty seat. Jeanie l" Paul's handsome face contorted.

"Who is Jeanie?" the painter wanted to know.

"My daughter!" yelled Paul. "My daughter!"

"But if Jeanie saw him . . ." Rosemary frowned and concentrated.

"How could she know where he'd been sitting? How could she know it was himI' said Paul, losing control of his grammar in his agitation, "who left the poison? Maybe she . . . Oh, no!" Paul groaned. "Jeanie's got sense. Jeanie's a darned sensible kid. You all know that," he appealed pitifully. "But I got to call home. If anything's happened to Mama! Oh no, oh Lord . . . I've got to get to a phone. She was pretty, you say?"

The painter said, "She was lovely." His eyes were watching. "Not quite the same thing."

"Jeanie is lovely. That's sure. I'm getting out of here." Paul was beside himself. "Listen, Mama likes her supper early. Jeanie will be fixing Mama's supper too soon now. It's getting on to five o'clock. I got to call. If Mama were to get that poison, what would I do?"

"Mama?" Mrs. Boatright raised her brows at the Gibsons.

"His mother-in-law," said Rosemary rather awesomely. "An old lady ... a crippled old lady . . ."

"She may be old but she's lived long enough to know something," raved Paul, as upset as anyone had ever seen him. "She's raised my Jeanie—raised me, if you want to know the truth. She's a wonderful old lady, God love her. . . . The whole house depends on her. I could never have gone on without her, when Frances died . . . Listen, I'm very sorry but I have to get going and it's my . . . well, my car."

"Mr. Marsh," said Rosemary, springing up, "could it possibly be his daughter?"

"Could be," said Theo Marsh. "No resemblance."

"Jeanie looks like her dead mother," cried Paul. "Not a bit like me. Listen, I'll take you all back into town, but you'll have to come now."

"I'll drive, said Lee Coffey with instant sympathy. ''You're kinda upset and I'm faster. I suppose this is possible?" he said to the rest of them.

"Is there a phone at the junction?" cried Paul.

"Yes, a phone," said Virginia, her hand still in Lee's hand.

"Oh yes," said Theo Marsh, "at the gas station. IJp,

Lavinia." The model stood up in her weird garb. The rest of them were streaming to the door.

"Wait for us," said the painter.

"Are you coming?" said the bus driver curiously.

"Certainly, rm coming. If you think I'm not going to be on hand to see how this works out! I'm not a man who misses much. Snap it up, Lavinia. We dump her at the junction. Her father runs the gas station."

Mr. Gibson had time to marvel at this, as they streaked for the car.

Lee, Virginia, and Paul were in the front, as before. In the back, Mrs. Boatright's broad beam occupied the center solidly. On her left, Theo Marsh held Lavinia on his lap, and on the right, Mr. Gibson held his wife, Rosemary. He felt tumbled and breathless, but fallen into a warm and lovely place, in the lee of Mrs. Boatright's good and warm and solid flesh, with Rosemary's physical being pressing upon his thighs and his arm holding her.

The car flew down the hill. It stopped. Everybody swayed. Paul was out and at the telephone. Lavinia kicked the long blue skirt about with her bare feet and got out clumsily. Mr. Gibson heard her say, "Hi, Paw."

"I suggest you get some pants on," a man's voice said without passion, "and take over the pumps, Lavinia. Mother's been announcing dinner the last five minutes and I'm famished."

Mr. Gibson heard Paul shouting that the line was busy. That something terrible could have happened.

Theo Marsh bellowed back, "Look here, you at the telephone. Let Lavinia get on the telephone. She's absolutely reliable. I guarantee that." He was leaning over the side waving his long skinny arms.

"No nerves, Lavinia," said the unseen father complacently.. "What's up?"

"Let her keep calling," bawled the artist. "While we get there."

"I'll tell them," said Lavinia. "Don't touch any olive oil and youse guys is on the way."

"No nerves, no diction," said the sad voice of the gas station man, with a shudder, unseen by but nevertheless divined by Mr. Gibson.

"Yes, do it." Paul was hoarse. "I can't stand here." He beat the telephone number out three times. (Lavinia got it the first time.) Then Paul climbed back into the car.

"All right, Lee," said Virginia to the bus driver.

"Off we go," howled the painter in joy. 'So long, Lavinia. Good girl," he told them. "She understands one hell of a lot about art."

"She does?" said Rosemary breathlessly. The car lurched and Mr. Gibson hung on to her.

Rosemary leaned to see around Mrs. Boatright. "Of course, as an artist, Mr. Marsh," she said in suspiciously sweet tones, "you live way out here to retreat from reality."

"The hell I retreat from reality," said the artist angrily. "Who told you that?" Mrs. Boatright contrived to shrink her bosom back against her backbone, somewhat, as they talked across her. " I see more reality in half a minute than any one of you can see in a day," raved the artist. "I don't even drive a car. I . . ."

"Because of your eyesight?" piped up Mr. Gibson promptly.

"Right," said Theo grumpily. "Cxood for you, Gibson, if it was Gibson speaking." The artist retreated into silence. Mr. Gibson felt as if he had just won a thrust.

"Hey?" said the bus driver over his shoulder. "What's this?"

"He sees too much," explained Mr. Gibson. "An ear, for instance. He'd be in the ditch."

"I bet he would." Rosemary actually chuckled in her old Rosemaryish way. Mr. Gibson was exhilarated. He pressed his cheek secretly against her sleeve, not wishing to laugh. After all, he was still a criminal. But with mirth rumbling inside of him, just the same.

"Pretty keen, this Gibson," said the bus driver to the blonde. "Mighty lively corpse he makes, hey?"

Paul said tensely, "Drive the car."

Virginia said soothingly, "He is. He will."

"Don't worry, Paul," said Rosemary, rather gaily. "Jeanie is a sensible girl."

"I know that." Paul turned and swept them with a harassed look. He put both palms swiftly over his hair, not quite holding his head, but smoothing it on, as he turned to yearn ahead once more.

"I've got the rest of you sorted out, but who is Paul?" asked the painter, reducing his volume. ''He wasn't on the bus."

"He's a neighbor of theirs," said Mrs. Boatright. "This

is his car. We ought to have called the police, you know."

The painter said under his breath to the back seat, "i doubt very much it was his daughter who took the green paper bag. She was distinguished. Whereas he . . ." The painter made an unspellable noise. It meant Big Deal!

"Paul," said Rosemary rather drowsily, "is as good as he is beautiful."

"And perishing dullI' said Marsh. "Am I right?".

Rosemary's arm came around Mr. Gibson's neck, to hang on, of course, for they were speeding. "Well, he is conventional," she said softly. "He's nice, but . » . everybody can't be interesting, like you." She leaned from Mr. Gibson's breast to peer at the painter.

"Oh ho, rm interesting all right," said Theo Marsh.

Mr. Gibson felt furiously jealous. This conceited ass was seventy if he was a day.

"And deeply interested, too. Same thing, you realize. Say, what's-your-name-Gibson . . . why did you plan to kill yourself in the first place?" asked Theo Marsh. "No money?"

"Money!" shrieked Rosemary.

"Why not?" said the artist. "Money is something I take care to have about me. Believe me. I'm a shrewd moneymaker. Am I not, Mary Anne?"

"A leech and a bloodsucker." said Mrs. Boatright calmly.

"Well, money is a serious matter," said Theo with a pout, as if nobody would talk seriously. "So naturally, I wondered. Is he broke?"

"No," said Rosemary shortly.

"In some kind of way," said Lee Coffey, with his keen ears stretched backward, "he was broke . . ."

"I assume," said Theo Marsh loftily, "that something bothers him. Want to know what, that's all."

"He won't say," said Mrs. Boatright, "but perhaps he can't . . ."

"Yes, he can," said Theo Marsh. "He's articulate. And I'm listening. It interests me."

"Oh, it does?" said Mr. Gibson spitefully. He felt Rosemary's body tensing.

"Shall I guess?" said she, in a brave voice that was full of fear. "He married me ten weeks ago ... to s-save me. He likes to help waifs and strays, you see. It's his hobby. But when I got well . . . there he was, still stuck with me."

"What!" cried Mr. Gibson, outraged. He grabbed her with both arms as if she might fall with his agitation. "No. No!"

"Well, then?" she trembled. "I don't know why you wanted to do it, Kenneth. I only guess . . . it's something Ethel put in your head." She leaned forward, far away from him, and put her hands on the front seat and laid her face on her forearm. "I'm afraid—it's something about me." And Mr. Gibson's heart ached terribly.

"We don't know," said Lee mournfully, over his shoulder. "Nope, we still don't know what it was that shook him."

Virginia said, "I should think you might tell us. We've been so close. Please tell us." Her little face was a moon setting on the horizon of the back of the seat. Her hand came up and touched Rosemary's hair compassionately. "It would be good for you to tell us,"

Mrs. Boatright said with massive confidence. "He will, in a minute."

Paul said, "You can take a short cut up Appleby Place."

"I'm way ahead of you," said Lee, "and Lavinia's had them on the phone by now."

"Lavinia!" spat Paul. "That girl with no clothes!" He evidently couldn't imagine being both naked and reliable.

Marsh said airily in his high incisive voice, "I guess Gibson likes his secret reason; hugs it to his bosom. Won't show it to us. Oh, no, we might spoil his fun."

"Don't talk like that!" cried Rosemary, straightening up. "You sound like Ethel."

So everybody talked at once, telling the painter who Ethel was.

"An amateur," the painter groaned. He had one foot up against the seat ahead. His socks were yellow. "How I loathe and despise these amateurs! These leaping amateurs! Amateur critics." He uttered a long keen. "Amateur psychologists are among the worst. Skim a lot of stuff out of an abbreviated article in a twenty-five-cent magazine . . . and then they know. So they treat their friends and neighbors out of their profundity. They put their big fat clumsy hands in where the daintiest probe can't safely go, and they rip and they tear. Nothing so cruel as an amateur, doing good. I'd like to strangle the lot of them."

Mr. Gibson stirred. "No," he said. "No, now I want you

to be fair to Ethel. I'll have to try to make you understand. It's just that . . . perhaps Ethel made me see it . . . but it's the doom." There. He had told them.

"Doom?" said Mrs. Boatright encouragingly.

He would have to explain. "We aren't free," he said earnestly. "We are simply doomed. It . . . well, it just suddenly hit me very hard. To realize ... I mean to believe and begin to apply—the fact that choice is only an illusion. That we are at the mercy of things in ourselves that we cannot even know. That we are not able to help ourselves or each other . . ."

They were all silent, so he pressed on.

"We are dupes, puppets. What each of us will do can be predicted. Just as the bomb ... for instance ... is bound to fall, human nature being what it . . ."

"Baloney," groaned the painter. "The old sad baloney! Predict me —Gibson. I dare you! You mean to say you got yourself believing that old-fashioned drivel?" he sputtered out.

But Rosemary said, "Yes, I see. Yes, I know. Me, too."

Then everybody else in the car, except Paul, seemed to be talking at once.

The bus driver's voice emerged on top. "Lookit!" he shouted. "You cannot, from where you sit, predict! I told you. Accidents! There's the whole big fat mixed-up universe . . ."

"What if I can't predict?" said Mr. Gibson, somewhat spiritedly defending his position. "An expert . . ."

"No, no. We are all ignorant," cried the nurse. "But it's the experts who know that. They know we're guessing. They know we're guessing better and better, because they're trying to check up on the guesses. You have to believe that, Mr. Gibson."

Mr. Gibson was suddenly touched. His heart quivered as if something had reached in and touched it.

Mrs. Boatright cleared her throat. "Organized human effort," she began.

"This is not the PTA, Mary Anne," the artist said severely. "This is one simple intelligent male. Give me a crack at him." He had come so far forward to peer at Mr. Gibson that he seemed to be crouching, angular as a cricket, on air. "Listen, Gibson. Take a cave man."

"Yes," said Mr. Gibson, helplessly, with a kind of melting feeling. "I'm taking one."

"Did he foresee his descendants flying over the North Pole to get from here to Europe tomorrow?"

"Of course not."

"So . . . how can you be as narrow-minded as a cave man?"

"Narrow?"

"Certainly. You extrapolate a future on what's known now. You extend the old lines. What you don't take into account are the surprises."

"Hey!" said the bus driver. "Hey! Hey!"

"Every big jump is a surprise, a revelation," lectured the artist, "and a tangent off the old. Penicillin. Atom splitting. Who guessed they were coming?"

"Exactly," cried Virginia. "Or the wheel? Or television? How do we know what's coming next?" She was all excited. "Maybe some whole vast opening up in a direction we've hardly thought of . . ."

"Good girl," said Theo Marsh, "Have you ever done any modeling?"

"Of the spirit, too," boomed Mrs. Boatright. "Of the mind. Men have developed ideals undreamed in antiquity. You simply cannot deny it. Would your cave man understand the Red Cross?"

"Or the S.P.C.A.," said the bus driver, "him and his saber-toothed playmates. Doom—schmoom. Also, if you gotta, you very often do. Take a jump, I mean. I'm talking about the bomb . . ."

"So the bomb might not fall," said Rosemary. She lifted her clasped hands in a kind of ecstasy, "because men might find something even better than common sense by tomorrow morning. Who knows? Not Ethel! Ethel is too—"

"Too rigid, I expect," said the painter. "Death is too rigid. Rigor is mortis. Keep your eyes open. You'll be surprised!" This was his credo. Mr. Gibson found himself stretching the physical muscles around his eyes.

"It's gonna fall if you sit on your fanny and expect it," the bus driver said, "that's for sure. But everybody isn't just sitting around, telling themselves they are so smart they can see their fate coming. Lookit, we'll know the latest news today, when we look backward from fifty years. Not before. The present views with alarm. It worries. It should. But these trends sneak up like a mist that you don't notice."

"Righto!" shouted the artist. ''You don't even see what's already around you in your own home town."

"People can, too, help each other," said Rosemary. She was sitting on his lap yet turned in facing him. "And I'm the living proof. You helped me because you wanted to, Kenneth. There wasn't any other reason."

"The ayes have it," the painter said. (Perhaps he said "eyes.") "You are overruled, Gibson. You haven't got a leg to die on. You can't logically kill yourself on that silly old premise." He drew back upon the seat and crossed his legs complacently.

The bus driver said dubiously, "However, logic . . ."

The nurse suddenly put her forehead against his arm.

Mrs. Boatright said firmly, "If you see that you were wrong, now you must admit it That is the only way to progress."

And then they waited.

Mr. Gibson's churning mind settled, sad and slow as a feather. "But in my error," he said quietly, "I may have caused a death."

Paul said uncontrollably, "If anything happened to Mama or Jeanie, I'll never forgive you."

"Don't say 'never,' " said Virginia, raising her head and speaking gently.

"It ain't scientific to say 'never,' hey?" said the bus driver, and leaned and kissed her ear.

The car shot off the boulevard upon a short cut.

Everyone was silent. The excitement was over. The poison was still lost. They hadn't found it.

And if in error there was learning and if in blame there was responsibility and if in ignorance there was hope—and if in life there are surprises—and if in doom there were these cracks—still, they had not put their hands upon a little bottle full of death, and innocently labeled olive oiL And it was no illusion.

Chapter XIX

TVIr R. GffisoN sat holding his wife in his lap, and this was -LVl bitter-sweet. "Rosemary," he said softly in a moment, almost whispering, "why did you say you hadn't run the needle into your finger . . . when you had?"

"Why do I think I said it?" But her face softened and she discarded the bitterness. "I just didn't care to have Ethel know ..." Her breath was on his forehead.

"Know what, mouse?"

"How much," said Rosemary. She drew a little away to look down into his eyes. "I loved our cottage," she said. "My—sentiments. She hasn't any sympathy with sentiment. I suppose it was sentimental, but I didn't want to go away."

Mr. Gibson squeezed his own eyes shut.

"But you went away, Kenneth. Ever since the accident," she whispered into his hair. "What did Ethel say to you?" He hid his face against where her heart was beating. "I' thought maybe you agreed," she said, "with her that I tried to be rid of my bargain. You would have been kind to me, even so. I couldn't tell."

"That was an accident," he murmured. "Mouse, I told you ..."

"I told you things . . . you didn't seem to believe," she said. "She is your sister, you do respect her. I thought you believed her, and you said you couldn't remember—I was afraid. . . . She had me so confused."

Paul said loudly, "Turn right, here. That's it. The third driveway." Paul, who was single-minded now. Paul, who said "Don't worry" when everyone did. But who urged them to worry when they seemed not to. Paul—who was so young—under whose genial good manners lurked a rather sulky boy.

"Ethel will be there now, I guess," said Rosemary, sucking in breath.

She moved, increasing the distance between them. The car stopped. Mr. Gibson opened his eyes. He saw the little cottage's roof on his left with its vines. It looked like home. But home was not for him . . . not any more. He had been confused and in hopeless confusion, he sadly surmised, he had doomed himself.

He limped badly, getting up on Paul's front terrace.

Jeanie Townsend, alive and strong, opened the door and cried eagerly, "Oh, did you find it?"

"She's not the one," croaked Theo Marsh. "I didn't think so."

Paul grabbed her in both his arms. "I was so scared, baby," he panted. "I thought maybe you'd got on the same bus ... I thought maybe you had that poison."

"Oh, for Heaven's sakes, Daddy!" Jeanie wiggled indignantly to get away from him. "How dumb do you think I am?"

"How's Mama?" Paul let her go and rushed past her.

Obviously, there was no poison here.

Jeanie looked at the crew of them . . . half a dozen suddenly drooping people on the doorstep. "Won't you come in?" she snapped, the polite child struggling with the angry one.

"Did Lavinia call?" asked Lee Coffey. "Hey, Jeanie?" He had exactly the same air with the young girl as he had with the elders.

"Somebody called. Was that Lavinia? We knew already. It was on the radio." Jeanie tossed her cropped head. She had on a red skirt and white blouse and a little red latticework on her bare feet for shoes. "When I went down to the mailbox—oh, a long time ago—I heard it on Miss Gibson's radio. So I turned on ours." She looked very haughty as if of course she would know what was going on in the world.

Mr. Gibson looked at Rosemary and she at him. "Then Ethel knows," he murmured. -He could not see an inch into the future. Rosemary moved until their shoulders touched.

"Well, I guess she mightn't know it was you" said Jeanie, backing inward, "because it didn't give your name on the radio. Grandma guessed that part of it."

"And you didn't run over and tell this Ethel or hash it out with her, neighborly? Hey?" asked the bus driver curiously.

"No," said Jeanie. She looked a little troubled about this but she didn't rationalize an excuse. Obviously she hadn't felt like hashing things out with Ethel Gibson. "Aren't you all coming in?"

They all came in.

Paul was in the living room and down on his knees beside old Mrs. Pyne's chair, and his handsome head was bowed. It was a strange position for him . . . theatrical, corny.

Mrs. Pyne was saying, as to a cliild, "But Paul, dear, you needn't have had a moment's worry about Jeanie or me ..."

Paul said, "You'll never know . . ." He sounded like a big ham.

Jeanie's eyes flashed. "What makes you think I'd eat any old food I found lying around or feed it to Grandma? Don't you think I know better? Honestly, Daddy!"

But Paul knelt there.

Now Mrs. Pyne smile around at them all, and her smile plucked out Mr. Gibson. "I'm so glad to see you," said the old lady. "I've been praying for you constantly since last I saw you."

Mr. Gibson moved toward her and took her frail dry hand. It had strength in it. He wanted to thank her for her prayers, but it seemed awkward, like applauding in church. She was a perfect stranger to him, anyhow, now that he saw her as the core of this house.

"Say, excuse me," said Theo Marsh, in a businesslike way, "are you interested in modeling?" Mrs. Pyne looked astonished.

"My name is Helen Pyne," said the old lady with spunk in her voice. "Who are you, sir?"

"Theodore Marsh, a humble painter." This Theo was part clown. He made "a leg. "Always looking for good faces."

"Humble, hey?" murmured the bus driver comically. "I'm Lee Coffey. I drive the bus."

"I'm Virginia Severson. I was a passenger."

"I am Mrs. Walter Boatright," said that lady, as if this sufficed. She stood, like the speaker of the evening, thoughtfully organizing her notes in her mind.

But it was Rosemary who burst out to Theo Marsh . . . "If it wasn't Jeanie you saw . . . then we don't know . . ."

"It wasn't Jeanie," said the artist. He had cocked his head as if to see Mrs. Pyne upside down. Mr. Gibson suffered an enlargement. He, too, saw the old lady's face, the sweetness around the eyes, the firmness of her dainty chin. Mrs. Pyne was not only more beautiful, she was even prettier than Jeanie.

"Then who? Then who?" Rosemary implored.

"I have great confidence in the police department," said Mrs. Boatright decisively, and took a throne. Rosemary stared at her and ran for the telephone.

Paul came out of his trance or prayer or whatever it was. "How did you know so much about what was going on?" he asked his mother-in-law adoringly.

"I knew it was bad, of course," the old lady said soberly, "when I heard Rosemary call. When Jean turned on the

radio, I knew at once who had left the bottle on the bus. I had just seen such trouble in his face, you know. Although there was nothing I- could do."

"Mrs. Pyne," said Mr. Gibson impulsively, "what you said made it impossible. I don't think I would have done it. But, of course, by then the trouble was different. I had already lost the poison."

"And haven't found it," she said sadly.

"No." He met her eyes. He accepted his gmlt and her mercy.

"We must all pray," said Mrs. Pyne.

"Trouble?" said the bus driver. His eyes slewed around to Virginia. "Trouble and logic . . . how do they jibe? I don't think we got to the bot—"

Virginia seemed to shush him.

Rosemary wailed on the phone, "Nothing? Nothing at all?" She hung it up. She walked back toward them. "Nothing. No news of it at all," she said and twisted her hands.

"No news is good news," said Paul.

But they all looked around at each other.

"A dead end, hey?" said the bus driver. "Ring around a rosy and no place to go from here." Fumes of energy boiled out of him and curled back with no place to go.

"Think!" said Virginia fiercely, "rm trying to think. Think, Mrs. Boatright." The little nurse shut her eyes.

Mrs. Boatright shut her eyes but her lips moved. Mr. Gibson realized that Mrs. Walter Boatright was importuning a superior in heaven, on his account.

But they-had come to an end. There was no place else to go.

He had rocked to his own feet now. It was time he took over. He said vigorously, "You have all done so much. You have done wonders. You must all go about your business, now, with my grat—my love," he said loudly. "It's on Gk)d's knees ... I guess, after all." (Was this the same as doom, he wondered?) "Rosemary and I must go across to Ethel." This was his duty.

"Yes," Rosemary agreed somberly.

"Ethel's hard by here?" said Theo Marsh with a wicked gleam in his eye.

"Theo," said Mrs. Boatirght warningly.

Paul Townsend was himself again, and host in this

house. "How about a drink first?" he said cordially. "I think we need one. Don't worry, Gibson . . ." He stopped himself cold.

"Wurra, wurra," said the bus driver. "Each for his own. That's what makes the mare go." He took a gloomy bite of his thumbnail.

Paul said, "I guess I dragged you all here for nothing." He looked boyishly penitent.

"A little drink won't do me any harm," said Lee. "Virginia would like one, too."

Theo Marsh perched like a restless bird on the edge of a table. "Thirsty as the desert in August, myself," he admitted. "What's to do now?" He cracked a knuckle.

Mrs. Boatright said, "We don't seem to have any clear course of procedure." She assembled her will. "I will call home and have a car sent, to take any of you wherever you wish. But first I would enjoy a rather weak drink, Paul. Thank you. Meantime, we may think of something." Mrs. Boatright was not accustomed to being beaten by circumstance.

Jeanie said, "I'll help you tend bar. Dad." And the bus driver began to tell Mrs. Pyne the saga of their search.

It was curiously like a party, and a party of loosened tongues, at that, well past the polite preliminaries. Mr. .1 Gibson sat beside Rosenlary on a sofa and tried to remem- ; ber that he was a criminal. Somebody, somewhere, could be dead, or now dying, by his hand.

Young Jeanie seemed to have caught on to the wide-open atmosphere. Holding the tray, she said to the Gibsons, "I'm sorry I got so mad, but Dad should have trusted me. My goodness, most of the time he leans on me too much."

"He's so fond of you, dear," said Rosemary, "and of your grandmother, too."

"He's absolutely tied to Grandma's apron strings," said , Jeanie impatiently. "I wish Re'd get married." |

"Z)o you?" said Rosemary sharply.

"Of course, we both do. Don't we, Grandma?"

"Wish Paul would marry?" Mrs. Pyne sighed. "We've J not been very successful matchmakers." j

"Look, I'm happy," said Paul, passing drinks.

Rosemary leaned forward and said deliberately, "But Mrs. Pyne, wouldn't Jeanie be terribly jealous of a stepmother? Isn't a teen-age daughter bound to be?"

I

"Subconsciously?" said Virginia, her clean-cut little mouth forming the word with distaste.

Mr. Gibson felt very queer. He kept his face a blank. He had a conviction that Lee Coffey, Theo Marsh, all of them, could see right through his skin.

"Here comes Ethel, hey?" said Lee. "Oh boy, this Ethel—';

"Jeanie," said Mrs. Pyne gently, "is truly fond of Paul."

"Honestly!" burst Jeanie. "How can she think that about me? She doesn't even know me. And I know the facts of life! I've been trying to marry Dad off for four years now. Pretty consciously," she flared.

"Ethel though," said the bus driver comfortably, "she knows better. Hey, Rosemary?" He winked.

"I don't think she knows much about teen-agers," said Jeanie. "We're a pretty bright bunch."

"Quite so," said Mrs. Boatright. "One should make a practice of listening to young people. Go on, my dear."

"We've even heard of Oedipus," Jeanie rushed on— flashing Mrs. Boatright a look of fierce response. "We're not stupid. I ask you, what's going to happen to Dad when I go off? And I'm going, some day."

"And I," said Mrs. Pyne, nodding calmly.

"If he hasn't got somebody, he's going to be just lost," said Jeanie. "He's an awful comfort-loving man."

Paul said, "These women . . . they nag me . . ." He lifted his glass. His eyes were suddenly inscrutable.

Mr. Gibson sipped his own drink, in automatic imitation. It was cold and tasteless, and then suddenly delicious.

"Well, of course," said Rosemary wickedly, "Ethel has her own ideas about crippled old ladies, too, Mrs. Pyne."

Paul looked very angry.

Mrs. Pyne lifted her hand, as if to forestall his anger and she smiled. "Poor Ethel," she said. "Well, she must live as best she can and think what will comfort her, I suppose. Never married. No children. Such a limited experience of life."

Mr. Gibson murmured his astonishment. "Ethel? Limited?" He had never thought of this.

"I don't think she has many connections with real people," said Mrs. Pyne. "That is to say, individuals. Or how could she judge them in such lumps?"

"She doesn't look—can't see," said Theo Mzirsh.

"They're a wild and wonderful lot," said the bus driver, patting Virginia's hand, "if you take them one by one. And that's the way I like them." Virginia blushed and shushed him.

"Still," said Mr. Gibson, clearing his throat, "Ethel has had quite a successful business career. She has faced up to facts all her life." (His tongue felt loose. He was almost enjoying this party.) "Whereas I," he went on, "am the one who has had the limited existence. A little poetry. Some academic backwaters. Even in the war, I . . ."

"How can you read poetry and not notice the universe?" said Lee indignantly. "You know who is limited? Fella who reads nothing but the newspaper, watches nothing but his own p's and q's, plus TV in the evening, works for nothing but money, buys nothing with the money but a car or a steak, does what he thinks the neighbors do and don't notice the universe. Actually," he sank back and slipped his fingers on his glass, "I never met anybody like that, myself."

''You read about him in the newspaper," said Theo Marsh.

"What war, Mr. Gibson?" asked Virginia.

"Oh . . . both wars. I was too old for Korea . . ."

"Oh yes," said Rosemary with charming sarcasm. "He has had so little experience. Only two wars, you see. Then there was the depression, the years when he took care of his mother, when he paid for Ethel's education. And that was weak and drifting of him, wasn't it? The years he has taught . . . who counts those? Ethel doesn't. I don't see why not," she added in a low voice. "Or why, when a man has led a useful life for fifty-five years and is kind and generous and good . . . why Ethel seems to assume he is so naive and so . . ."

"Innocent?" supplied Mr. Gibson, his eyes crinkling. (He was having a lovely time.)

"Backwaters?" snapped Theo Marsh. "What d'ya mean? What does she think life is made of? Your name in the metropolitan newspapers? Cafe society?"

"No, no. Facts," said Mr. Gibson. "Mean-ness. People who run knives in your back. Egos and burglars . . ."

"Please." The painter stopped him with a loud groaning. "Why is everything loathsome and unpleasant called a fact? Thought fact was another name for truth. And evil truths may be . . . but truth does not equal evil. I'll tell you,

you can't paint a decent picture without the truth in it."

"Or write a decent poem, either," said the bus driver, "or teach a decent lesson. Or earn an honest penny. You know, I think he is innocent." He looked around belligerently.

"I think he's a dear," said Virginia warmly.

Mrs. Boatright was nodding judiciously. "Theo," said she, "I believe the Tuesday Club would listen to you on this subject . . ."

"For a hundred and fifty lousy bucks?" said Theo. "Bah! Those cheapskates!"

Mr. Gibson tried very hard not to be having so much fun. Here, beside Rosemary, in this clean and comfortable and charming room where the dainty gentlewoman in her wheel chair was their true hostess, where all these lively people spoke their minds . . . No, no—he must remember that he had to face the music.

Sometimes, however, he thought with a boom of pleasure that would not be denied, there is music. That's the funny thing! This group of people, the way they talked to him, the way they argued with him, contradicted him, tried to buck him up, liked him and worried for him, and fought with him against fate, and gave him of their own faiths . . . this touched him and made music in his heart. He thought no man had ever had so delightful an experience as he had had this day of his suicide.

But such pleasure was only stolen. He must go. He must face whatever would come, nor would it be music, altogether.

Chapter XX

HE STARTED TO RISE. "Wait a minute," said the bus driver. "Listen, kids . . ."

"Yes, Lee?" said Mrs. Boatright alertly. "We got our hair down, all of us. Hey? Let's not skim the surface here. Don't go, Gibson. Yet. I want to know the answer to one question that's been worrying me. Rosemary . . ."

"Yes, Lee?"

Mr. Gibson sat dowij. He trembled. This bus driver was a shrewd man, in his own way.

"Now, this Ethel, she decides your subconscious wants to get rid of him. That's right, isn't it? Tell me, what reason did she decide your subconscious had for this?"

Rosemary flushed.

"She'd figured out a reason?"

"Yes," said Rosemary. "Of course she had." Her fingers turned her glass. "These marriages never work, you know," said Rosemary almost dreamily. "Kenneth is twenty-three years older than I. Isn't that terrible! Ethel thinks that subconsciously . . ." she went on very quiet and yet defiant and brave, "I must wish I had a younger mate."

"Like who? Hey?" said the bus driver, his eyes lively, his sandy lashes alert. The painter sat up. Mrs. Boatright looked suddenly very bland and supercalm.

"Like Paul," said Rosemary.

"Now we're getting to the bottom," said the bus driver with satisfaction.

"Aha!" said the painter.

"Oh now, look, Rosie," said Paul, crimson. "Now you know . . ."

"I thought I knew," said Rosemary, and smiled at him.

"If our hair is down," said Jeanie bluntly, "all right. I'll tell you something. She is too old —for Daddy."

Mr. Gibson felt a wave of shock ripple through him. Rosemary! Too old!

"He likes them rather plump, about five years older, and two inches shorter, than me," said Jeanie impudently, "as far as I can figure on the basis of experiments, so far."

"Now you . . . just be quiet, please," said Paul, much embarrassed. "I'm sorry, Rosie, but after all you are his wife. I certainly . . ."

"Don't be sorry," said Rosemary gently. Her face be came ver)' serene as she lifted it. "You've been kind, Paul You've tried to comfort me. You've told me not to worry But I am too old for you, of course. Just as you are . . forgive me, dear Paul . . . just a bit too dull for my taste You see, I like a seasoned man."

"Good for you," said Theo Marsh complacently. "Intelligent woman."

"Ethel just can't seem to believe," said Rosemary, calm

and sad, "anything so simple. The fact is, I married the man I love."

Mr. Gibson, looking at his glass, could see her fingers, slim and fair, upon her own.

"However," said Mr. Gibson out of a trance, able to speak quite coolly, although somewhat jerkily, "it is still possible that, as Ethel says, I am, for Rosemary, a father-image."

Rosemary looked at him with mild astonishment. "Not my father," she said calmly. "My father, since the day I was bom, was mean and didactic and unjust and petty and spoiled and childish. I don't like to sound disloyal, but that's the truth. Kenneth isn't anything like my father," she explained graciously to them all.

"It is a little ridiculous, though," said Mr. Gibson chattily. (This was the strangest party!) "I am fifty-five years old, you see. For me to be so deep in love, for the first time in my life, is quite . . . comical. Somehow. It makes everybody smile."

"Smile?" said Virginia. "But of course! It's nice! It's pleasant to see."

"I should have said . . . snicker," revised Mr. Gibson.

"Who," growled the bus driver, "does it make snicker?"