The Dancing Detective

Silent As the Grave

It was a night like any other night. The moon was out; and there were stars.

A man and a girl strolling in the dark; the oldest story in the world. The music, mournful, nostalgic on the night air, ebbed away behind them, and the lights of the pavilion went with it. She was glad they were gone; just being with him was entertainment enough. She had her music and her dancing in the sound of his voice, the touch of his hand in hers.

Presently they came to a bench and, without a word, sat down. She knew why they had come out here. She knew what he was going to ask her. She wanted him to ask her. She had her answer ready, before he asked her, and it was “Yes.”

His head went back, to look up at the stars. She looked at the turn of his chin, at the gnarled hitch in his throat, those were, for her, the stars. The starlight traced a thin silver line, like frost, along the upturned edge of his profile. That was proportionately all she knew of him, she reflected, that thin, argent, contour line; and the rest was still all in darkness, unknown, unguessed, like a planet already there but not yet emerged.

Her mother said it was risky to love anyone as much as she did him, so soon after meeting him, and knowing so little about him. Her mother said with dark head shakes, “Now don’t be in too much of a hurry, young lady!” and “Just be careful what you’re doing!” and other things like that your mother says to you. What did her mother know? Her mother’s time for love was past.

Three weeks, two days, twelve hours. Yes, it was a short time. Very short for a lifetime.

Mitchell. Kenneth Mitchell. She said it over softly in her mind. Mitchell. Mrs. Frances Mitchell. No, Mrs. Kenneth Mitchell. That was better. She wanted everything to belong to him, even her first name.

“Frances—” His arm slipped around her.

This was it. Here it came now. She nestled closer. “Yes, Ken?”

“I’m in love with you. Would you — you wouldn’t marry me, would you?”

“Yes, Ken,” she sighed. “I would.” She seemed to blend into his arms, almost to lose her own identity, as if she were a part of him, his other self. They didn’t stir for awhile, just stayed like that, blindly contented, without need for anything else. All the traffic of courtship — caresses, kisses, words of love — were superfluous. Their oneness was their sole caress.

Then suddenly his arm was gone. She was alone again, there was space between them on the bench.

“I had no right— I didn’t mean to ask you that.”

“But it’s all right, Ken. Can’t you tell it’s all right?”

“There’s something I have to tell you first. Something you’ve got to know.”

Something about some other girl, of course. What else could it be? What else did a man have to tell a girl at a time like this, what else ever mattered between man and girl? All the rest belonged in the man’s world, a sphere apart that the girl never entered, that didn’t conflict with her.

“But Ken, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to know.”

“You have to know this. This is something you have to. Before I ask you. Before you answer me.”

She edged closer, by way of mute consent. She waited.

“Frances, I killed a man once.”

For a minute it was meaningless. All she could feel was a sense of relief. It was almost anticlimax. The threatened impediment had dissolved. She had been afraid of some entanglement barring her way, some undissolved marriage or unsevered amorous connection. But this was from that other sphere, that other plane, the man’s world; this had nothing to do with her, this didn’t conflict with her in any way. This wasn’t anything that could affect their love.

This was almost as if a small boy were to come to you and say, “I threw a rock through somebody’s window and broke it.” He shouldn’t have, it was wrong of him, the policeman down on the corner mightn’t approve — but that didn’t lessen your own affection for him in any way; how could it?

She breathed deeply, in lightened tension. “I thought it was — that there was somebody else.” Then almost in parenthesis, “What was it, an accident?”

He shook his head doggedly. “It was no accident. It was what they call — murder. I went looking for him, and I found him, and — I did it.”

Their oneness persisted; the thing had no power to divide them, every pore in her body was conscious of that fact. “What did they do to you, Ken?”

He said it lower than before. “They never found out it was me. They don’t know to this day. I never gave myself up, because... well, he had it coming to him, he deserved it. He’d done me an injury. And I never forgive an injury.”

An old rancor came up in him. She could feel the stiffening, the anger, from somewhere out of his past.

“It happened in St. Louis, long ago. Ten years ago. His name was Joseph Bailey, and he—”

Her hand flew up against his mouth, sealing it. “No more. I don’t want to know any more.”

They sat like that for a few minutes. Then, finally, her hand dropped. She had made her decision.

“Ask me what you were going to,” she whispered. “Ask me. Nothing makes any difference. Nothing could change the way I feel about you. Nothing you could tell me.”

His eyes kept pleading with her in the starlight. “But maybe later you won’t feel the same. That’s what I’m afraid of. Promise me you won’t change. Promise me you won’t throw it up to me, some day, if we should quarrel, like people do. I couldn’t stand that, Frances. Promise me you’ll never mention it, never remind me, in days to come.”

She tilted her face to look up into his eyes. “I’ll do more than promise. I swear it to you. I take a sacred vow, here and now. You’ll never hear me speak of it again. It’ll be just as though you never told me. It’ll never pass my lips. I’ll be as silent as the grave, dear heart. As silent as the grave, forever.”

He made a sudden little move, and her arms, outstretched to poise protestingly against his shoulders, seemed to cave in across the little dimpled hollows opposite their elbows, and the span between the two of them had vanished, they were together again for good.

It was a night like any other night. The moon was out; and there were stars.

That this state of chronic happiness could keep on like that for three years after was no surprise to her, for she had expected it to. She had known it would, she had been sure it would, but still she could not have explained why it should. How was it that it lasted with them, when others seemed to lose it so slowly but nevertheless so surely? Was she different from others? Was he?

She knew they weren’t. She knew it wasn’t that. They were as hemmed-into a tiny cubicle of two rooms and bath, ceilings low over their heads, as any other city dwellers. They were stripped of all artifices, all privacy, all mystery, before one another. There would be nothing, soon, that they could say to one another they had not said before; nothing they could do they had not seen one another do already. Almost, nothing they could think, the other did not guess that they were thinking.

He came home as pinched and chilled in the winter, as frayed and tired in the summer, as any other man, as all other men. His feet sometimes would hurt and he would take his shoes off. On Sundays he didn’t shave, and the rim of his jaw would look shadowed and soiled. Her hair could grow as dank hovering over the torrid steaming stewpans, of a blazing July evening, as any other woman’s; her nose could grow as blue and she could sniffle just as inelegantly through it, on arising before him at the crack of a bitter winter dawn to close the windows and turn the heat valves, as any other woman’s.

And still, whatever this magic was that filled their hearts with content, it survived all that. It survived without a necktie at the table, without cosmetics at the night table, without the utterance of any startlingly original remark any longer, without the belated revelation of any new quality, any unguessed facet to the personality, kept hidden until now.

Why was this? No one could know. If they could not know themselves, how could anyone else know?

It wasn’t one of these gusty, flaring things that quickly exhausts itself and dies out again, leaving an ash of bitterness and cold. It reminded her of the pilot light on the gas stove in her kitchen. Not very bright, not very noticeable, but always there, burning steady, burning low, at the center of its little world.

A doctor once, whom they had gone to consult about some minor matter — a boil on Ken’s neck that required lancing — came as close, perhaps, to putting his finger on it as anyone could have, though even his interpretation may have veered too closely to the clinical. Looking them over in shrewd appraisal, as they sat there before him side by side after the trivial operation, he asked with kindly interest, “About how long are you two married, six months or so?”

“Three years last May,” she answered, with a smile that had in it both vainglory and humility.

It apparently startled him somewhat. She saw him shake his head slightly, in admiring approval. “You seem to be very well-mated,” he murmured thoughtfully. Then added, “Both mentally and physically.”

She looked down at the floor for a moment, and could feel her face grow warm. It was a little bit like — being disrobed for an examination. Neither she nor Ken referred to it between themselves afterward, on leaving.

They were so content, so at peace with one another and hence with the world, they didn’t even want much more than they had in a material way. Ambition is a plant that sprouts best in the loam of discontent. Certainly they didn’t crave great wealth. For what purpose? Clothes? In the darkness of the picture theater they went to once a week, who could tell whether she had on a fifty-dollar or a five-dollar dress? Better furniture, a roomier apartment? They’d have that some day, maybe in a year, or two, or three; it wasn’t urgent. What difference did your surroundings make, when all you saw, all you cared about, all you were aware of, was that other face before you? When it wasn’t there, the walls were barren; when it was, they were lighted, radiant, warm. A car? They could have that, too, in a little while; only a very small down payment was required. But what real need was there for one, when the subway kiosk was only down at the next corner?

Even children— She didn’t really miss them, and when her mother, once or twice, slyly asked her if she were avoiding having any, her answer was: “No, but it’s just as well we haven’t had any. It’s Ken I love; I haven’t room for anything else.”

The job he had, fit him like a comfortable pair of old shoes. He’d grown into it. He’d already had it for two years before their marriage, five in all now. It had become a part of the very warp and woof of his existence, as closely knitted to him as she was. It was not a job, that designation was incorrect, not just an offhand way of earning a living. It was that part of his life that was spent away from her, from morning until early evening each day, and just as cherished, just as dear to him in another way, as the part spent with her.

The man over him was lenient, friendly, understanding. Hallett was his name, and he had made an invisible third at the table with them so many nights that she felt she knew him well, though she had never met him.

He’d say, “Hallett came back from his vacation today, and you wouldn’t know him. He’s put on fifteen pounds in the two weeks.”

“I’m glad he picked up a little, he was looking all in before he went away,” she would say, although she’d never seen him. But Ken had said he was.

Or, “Hallett’s kid is coming out with a new tooth. I wish you could have seen him. He was sitting there proud as a peacock all day.”

“My, but it’s forward!” she’d marvel. “That’s the second one, already, in no time at all.”

Nearly every night he sat there with them at the table like that, an invisible but welcome third.

Once, around the time the dying decade was merging un-noticeably into the strange new times ahead, Ken received an offer of another job, at better pay.

“Did you tell Hallett about it?” she asked him.

“Sure. I wouldn’t do anything behind his back. He’s been too regular to me.”

“What did he say?”

“He said much as he’d hate to see me go, he didn’t want to stand in my way. He gave it to me fair and square. He said he couldn’t give me any more than I’m getting now. He said the bottom’s starting to drop out of everything; what happened in Wall Street is starting to spread around now, and it’ll take a good six months, maybe more, before it wears off again. But on the other hand, he told me, as long as he’s with the outfit, I haven’t got a thing to worry about, he’ll see that I’m treated fair and square. I can consider myself set for life.”

And in a day or two, when she asked him, “Have you decided what you’ll do about that?”

“I’ve turned the offer down; I’m staying with Hallett.”

She’d known he would. She was glad he had. She wanted him happy. Or rather, she wanted the two of them to be happy; his happiness was hers.

And then suddenly there was no Hallett any more. He was gone overnight, and a stranger had taken his place at their supper table. It was almost like a personal bereavement to the two of them, that first night when he came home and told her. Her face even paled for a moment or two, as his must have when he’d first learned it earlier in the day. He couldn’t eat very much.

“What’s he like, this new man, this Parker?”

“I can’t tell yet, I only saw him today for the first time.” He tried to be fair to him. “I suppose he’s all right. He’s sort of lost, hasn’t got the hang of things yet.” He turned his fork over a few times, without lifting it from the table.

“You’ll get used to him,” she tried to console him. And then with an odd little burst of commiseration, “That poor woman! Hallett’s wife. Just think what she must be going through tonight!”

She had a rather strongly developed fellow-feeling for other women, not a very commonly met with trait.

“He doesn’t like me,” he blurted out one night a few weeks later.

“Maybe you just imagine that.” She wondered, privately, how anyone could possibly not like Ken.

“I can tell. He knows I’m one of Hallett’s old men, of course, and he’s got it in for me. I can tell by the way he looks at me.”

“Well, don’t give him an opening, don’t give him a chance to show it.”

“I’m not. I’m minding my own business, and doing my job, like I’ve always done.”

They were selling apples and tangerines on the street corners now. That is to say, peddling them out of sheer destitution, in a city that had never known emergency beggary before, only the professional kind. These vendors were men in their prime, able-bodied. Then abruptly within a month or two, the phenomenon had vanished again, as if already the proportion of those reduced to such straits, as over against those remaining still above it, had increased too greatly to permit any further profit to be derived from it. The ratio of the needy to the prospering had reversed itself.

Parker cut his wages in half. His bitterness, brought home to smoulder there in worried sight of her, was not due so much to that in itself as to the fact that others, there a shorter time than he, had not been similarly reduced. “Parker’s own men,” as he expressed it.

“But are you sure?”

“I asked a couple of them. They wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell by the look on their faces when they heard it that they hadn’t been cut themselves.”

“But that’s not fair.”

His mouth twisted into an ugly shape. “You bet it isn’t. I’m taking the cut, so that some of his men don’t have to be let out.”

“Maybe if you went to him and—”

“That’s just what he’d like me to do, so that he could chuck me out altogether. You should have seen his face when I stepped away from the cashier’s window and opened my envelope. I caught him looking at me with a smirking expression all over his face.”

“But why, Ken? You haven’t done anything to him.”

“He’s got it in for me, that’s all. And that’s something you can’t buck. You can’t buck that on any job, when the guy over you has it in for you. He’s got you, and you know it, and he knows it.”

“Maybe things’ll begin to clear up, and you can go somewhere else. The President says by next spring—”

“Does he work at my job?” he said glumly. Then after a while he added, “I’m only hanging on because I have to. I’ve got to get out of there, the minute I can. It’s gotten so that just looking at the guy does something to me, inside. Every time he even passes in back of me while I’m busy at my layouts, I can feel something—”

She could sense that tightening-up again come over him that she had noticed one night long ago. Long ago, on a bench, beneath the stars.

“I don’t hate easy, Frances,” he muttered, “but once I start in, I don’t quit easy either. I never forget an injury.”

She dropped her eyelids for a moment, raised them again. A forbidding memory had crossed her mind just then. “Sh!” she urged, “Sh-h-h,” and pressed her hand soothingly to his forehead, as if to cool it.

It was a night like any other night. There was no moon, but there were stars.

She was already badly frightened by then, it was so late and she had stood so long watching for him from the window. Then when she finally saw his figure approaching below in the dark, she knew by his walk something was the matter. He didn’t even remember the right door, went on past their own house entrance almost to the next one down, then just as she was about to fling up the window and call out to him, he turned abruptly, retraced his steps, and came in where he belonged.

She left the window, and in the moment or two it took her to reach their flat door, wrung her hands close before her face in flurried, unseen appeal, to whom or what she did not know herself.

He came up the stairs quietly and slowly, to where she was waiting. His face was white with spent emotion, but composed. There was a big rent in his shirt, up near the collar, and two of the buttons on his coat were gone. Then when he’d gone in past her, wordlessly, and raised his hands to remove his hat, she saw that his hair was disordered, and there was a faint trace of orange across his knuckles that must have been left there by shed blood.

He sat down heavily and blew breath between his cupped hands, as though to warm them, although it wasn’t cold out.

She drew up a kitchen chair and sat down across the table from him. He didn’t seem to want to say anything, and she was afraid to for awhile. Presently she reached over toward him timidly, as if afraid of being rebuffed, and drew the knot of his necktie out from under his rumpled collar, where it had become wedged, and around toward the front where it belonged.

“Parker, Ken?” she asked finally.

He began to speak as though his silence had been an oversight, he had simply been waiting to have it called to his attention. His voice was husky from recent stress. “They took me to the police station, that’s why I got back so late.”

She started using the tips of her fingers for the teeth of a comb, raking his hair back with them, very softly, very persuasively. She didn’t say anything.

He smiled at nothing she could see there on the floor. “I hit him good,” he said with grim satisfaction. “Boy, what a slam I gave him! That one sock alone was worth everything I’ve had to take from him all these months. He went all the way back across his own desk and then down to the floor on the other side of it, and all the stuff he had on it went down on top of him. Just like you see in the pictures.”

They were just like little boys, she thought. Only, the consequences of their acts could be so much graver when their bodies had become those of men.

“If they hadn’t grabbed me and held me back, I think while I was at it I would have—”

She tried to ward the word off by quickly shuttering her eyes. He didn’t say it anyway.

“So then he called in a cop. You know — trying to throw a scare into me. They held me over there for awhile. Finally he phoned in that he didn’t intend lodging any complaint, they could let me go if they wanted to. Bighearted.” He almost spat the word. “So I’m through there,” he said finally.

“Never mind, maybe it’s better so. I’m glad it’s over. It was starting to get you, Ken. I could see it more and more every day.”

“I’ll get another job,” he said. “Watch me.”

She waited a moment or two. Then she asked timidly, “But what about references, Ken? They’ll want them everywhere, no matter where you go; these days especially, when there are a dozen and one applicants for every job. And as long as he’s down there in charge, even if someone just phones in to ask anything about you, he’d be just mean enough to—”

He didn’t answer for some time, as though that had only now occurred to him — for the first time. Then finally he said, “If I ever find that out—” And didn’t finish it.

Their money came to an end on a crisp fall morning in the third year of the bad new times, the Election Year, that was. They went together to the bank to draw it out, although the account was in his name alone. The way a couple feel obliged to attend some solemn formal occasion together, a deathbed or a funeral, when the presence of one without the other would be unthinkable.

“This closes the account,” the teller reminded them gratuitously.

It was only a matter of four-dollars-fifty-cents, that was all that was left by then; but somehow when the leaves of the passbook had been perforated to form the letters “Closed” and it had been returned to them worthless, it did make a difference, a vast difference. She could feel it herself; a psychological difference. There was a horrid nightmare-feeling to it of going down over their heads into black, bottomless depths of water, never to rise again.

He walked out of the bank dazed, staring down at the little booklet, frittering its pages back and forth under his thumb endlessly. She had to guide him, unnoticeably, with her arm under his to keep him from jostling into people. Outside on the sidewalk he came to a halt, as though not knowing which way to go. “There goes — security,” he said finally. “There go — three years of our lives.”

“Don’t, Ken,” she pleaded. “Don’t take it like that.” She freed the booklet gently from his hands and shied it into a refuse can. “Come on. Come on home now.”

He only said one thing more, very quietly, almost stonily. But she didn’t like the sound of it. “I have Garrett Parker to thank for this.”

He got something to do several weeks later, but it wasn’t a job any more. He was paid by the hour, twenty-five cents an hour. Demonstrating in a drugstore window. Some impulse made her follow him there later in the day; he had told her where it was.

She saw this small crowd collected in front of the place, and she crept up behind them, rose on tiptoes, looked fearfully over their shoulders. He was within the lighted showcase, stripped to his undershirt and trousers. He had always had powerful shoulders and biceps, they showed up well. He was holding up a small patent-medicine, pointing to it, then flexing his arms so that his muscles swelled, striking himself on the chest like Tarzan in the movies. At twenty-five cents an hour. For anyone who came along the street to stand and gape at.

She would have died rather than let him see her looking at him; his crucifixion was complete enough without that. She turned and fled all the way home, her arms protectively clasped around her own form as though she had been suddenly stripped naked. She couldn’t forget that telltale pulsing she had noted at his temple, that betrayed how he had been steeling himself.

She didn’t say anything when he came home at last, only tried not to look at the seventy-five cents he put down on the edge of the table. She didn’t tell him that she’d seen him, that she knew what it was for.

He toppled into a chair and hung his head.

“I’m ashamed,” he breathed stifledly. “Frances, I’m so ashamed.”

“Don’t go back there again, Ken,” she said. “I won’t let you.”

His attitude of humiliation, of self-reproach, was much harder to bear than the conditions that had brought them to this pass. “I shouldn’t have met you, married you. I’m not even able to give you food for your mouth. I’m no good.”

She dropped to her knees beside him. “I don’t know what words to say, to tell you what you mean to me. I’m as proud of you now as if you had all kinds of money, and were on top of the world. I don’t know how not to be proud of you.”

From his hidden face and concave middle, arched over the table-top, came those peculiar, wrenching guttural sounds of male grief she had never heard before and never wanted to hear again. And through the subsiding sobs, at last, a still, cold voice filtered. “One man did this to me. One man.”

Then a ray of brightness, when night was at its darkest. A beam of hope. He went to look up Hallett in his despair; his former boss, the one before.

“Oh, Ken! Can he do something for you—?”

He couldn’t bring it out coherently at first. But the mere fact that he wanted to so bad, was so pitifully anxious to tell it, showed her in a flash that it must be good. “Wait’ll you hear— My own line of work, France! He’s going to talk to them right tomorrow. I’m to go down there. He’s not in the business himself any more, but he knows these people, and he thinks he can swing it for me. He says with my previous experience there shouldn’t be any reason— And what do you think he tried to do? I caught him trying to slip something into my pocket when I wasn’t looking. A five-dollar bill. Didn’t want to hurt my feelings by asking me openly if I—”

His face was a poem of gratitude. He said with husky, feigned censure that was meant for the deepest admiration, “The old son-of-a-gun. What can you do with a guy like that?”

He couldn’t sleep all night, that night. But there was a difference. He didn’t lie there growling surreptitiously deep inside his throat, hissing maledictions through his clenched teeth. He lay there wide-eyed, breathlessly hopeful. She knew, because she couldn’t sleep either. They both got up much earlier than they needed to, red-eyed, haggard, supremely happy. She walked with him as far as the corner to see him off. She wished him luck. Long after he had disappeared from sight she stood there looking after him. Praying.

But when he came back there was something wrong. Her own face dimmed to the lacklustre of his.

“Ken, didn’t they—? Did Hallett forget to talk to them?”

“References,” he said tersely. He swallowed before he could bring himself to pronounce the name. “Parker.”

She just looked at him, caught her underlip with her teeth in foreboding.

“He was my last boss, after Hallett. Hallett’s recommendation wasn’t enough by itself.”

He dropped heavily into a chair, shaded his eyes. “They’ll let me know tomorrow. It’s still this way.” He seesawed his hand uncertainly, to show her. “I think I still have a chance.”

She knew what he was thinking, though. “Don’t be afraid. No one could be that inhuman. What can he truthfully say against your ability? Nothing. Only that you lost your temper once and went for him.”

She could see his cigarette all night in the dark, glowing and then dimming again, over there by the window. Like a pulsing ember of frustration.

When he was leaving the next day, she said: “Ken, I know it’s extravagant, but would you phone me as soon as you find out? I’ll wait downstairs in the candy store, right by their phone. Just so I’ll... I’ll know sooner.”

He didn’t say anything, but he kissed her affirmatively.

She waited there from ten on. She sat perched on one of the high stools before the soft-drink counter. She chatted with the proprietor’s wife. She sat on, waiting, long after they’d stopped chatting for lack of anything further to talk about. She was glad when three o’clock came, and the woman changed places with her high-school-age daughter, and was no longer there to be a witness to her misery.

Four o’clock came, and five, and the new place would be closing soon. All business places closed around five or so.

She stood up abruptly, and put a nickel in the phone, and called it herself; he’d given her its name.

Timidly she asked, “Has there — has there been a new man taken on today?”

The girl said, “Yes, I believe there has.”

Her heart soared, and all the wait was nothing. “Could you— would you give me his name, please?”

The girl looked it up, or got it from someone.

“Howard Ellson,” she said.

She felt her way along the soft-drink counter, and out the door, and upstairs to their flat. He was sitting there, with the lights unlit. He must have come back long ago, hours ago, while she stayed on waiting in the candy store below.

He just looked up at her, then looked down again. She would have read that look anyway, even if she hadn’t already known. She didn’t go to him and put her hands on him. His grief needed elbowroom.

“He did it,” he said after a long time.

He took a long breath, seemed to draw air slowly into his lungs, for a whole minute or two, and never let it out again. “I ought to kill him,” he said almost inaudibly.

“Ken,” she moaned. “Ken.”

“It was my one chance, and it won’t come again. I had it, and I lost it — thanks to him. Someone else has the job now, and people hang onto their jobs these days. I can’t asked Hallett to go around acting as an employment agent for me. Months more of misery now for the two of us. On his account. Maybe years. Do you know what that means?” He pulled his shirt open and ground his fist against his bared chest. “Do you know what it does to you, in here, when you can blame that all on one man? Not Fate, not Conditions, not Bad Luck or Coincidence — but one man, walking around on the very same streets you are, not very far from where you are.”

“Ken, don’t. Think of me. I can’t stand it when I hear you talk like that.”

And then he said again, more softly than the first time, almost in a baleful whisper, “I’d like to kill him.” And she saw his hands close up and freeze.

She got him to eat a little, after awhile. She thought the worst of it was over by then. And then later, he was sitting there in the kitchen, directly behind her, while she washed the dishes.

There wasn’t a sound from him. She turned her head suddenly and looked, and the chair was empty. The wet plate dropped and shattered into the spokes of a wheel, and she ran to the door and looked out.

Hours later she was waiting down on the corner for him, when he finally came along. He was drunk, she could tell by his walk. But that didn’t matter, nothing mattered; only that he came along. She ran to him and put her arm about his waist, and they went wavering back toward the house together.

“Ken, why did you do this to me, why did you frighten me this way? You left without a word, without saying goodbye. Ken, I thought such awful things.”

He knew what she was saying, could understand. “Poor France,” he said. “I’m drunk. It didn’t do any good. I didn’t forget once, the whole time I was doing it.”

They went up the inside stairs slowly, side by side, reeling as though they were both drunk and not just one of them. “I’m drunk, France. You never saw me that way before, did you? You don’t want to kiss me now, do you? But I still want to kiss you. More than ever.”

“I do. Look. I do.”

When they got inside their own flat, he toppled heavily into a chair, almost pulling her down with him.

“Shall I help you off with your shoes?”

He shook his head, smiled wanly. “I’m not that drunk.” His hands went up.

“Let me see your face. Why are you covering your face like that?”

“What is there to see?”

There was nothing. It was just his face, as it had always been. His hands, released, went up to it again and covered it once more.

Just before their evening meal, something happened to change him. She couldn’t tell exactly what it was, at first. He’d still seemed all right when he came in with the paper and sat down to read it. Then by the time she’d called him to eat, there was already something different about him, some alteration had taken place. It had none of the symptoms she was so familiar with by now. She couldn’t tell what it was. She could discern something utterly new in it, constraint, furtiveness; and could only ascribe it to remorse for last night’s drunkenness. But if he was ashamed, why so belatedly ashamed, at the end of the day? Why not immediately on getting up and facing her this morning? He hadn’t been then.

She saw him looking at her closely several times, as if wondering how to forestall some discovery she was bound to make eventually herself. Abruptly, he said, “Did you see that, in the paper?”

“What?” she asked.

“Turn toward the back. No, the page after that.”

Parker had been found dead on the street near his house. The details didn’t matter. Scarcely any were given, anyway. Only that he had met death by violence at somebody’s hands. “Some person unknown,” the paper said.

She peered at him through the mist of stupefaction that the item had created in her mind. She saw him drop his eyes, then raise them again with an effort, to meet hers.

“Why didn’t you tell me right away? As soon as you first read it?”

“I felt funny about it,” he admitted with a defensive shrug.

At first she couldn’t understand what he meant by that. “But why, Ken? Why should you feel funny about it?”

He looked away, sidewise, down at the floor. “Because I’ve been talking about him like I have; knocking him so.”

It sounded lame, it didn’t ring true somehow. She felt his real reason went deeper than that. But for once her understanding of him failed her, she couldn’t imagine what it was.

Presently, as they sat there discussing the event, she murmured, with that characteristic compassion of hers toward other women: “I feel sorry for his poor wife. What she must have felt, when he didn’t come home, and then finally a stranger rang the doorbell to tell her—”

“It was a good job!” he blurted out savagely. “He had it coming to him, if anyone ever did!”

She sat in stunned silence after that. Not because of what he’d just said, but because of a discovery that what he had just said had brought about. The discovery was this: his recent self-consciousness about the item being in the paper was not due to the way he had reviled Parker, as he had said it was. It could not be. For here he was doing it again. He’d contradicted himself, without realizing it.

It must have been due to something else.

It only came to her that night, in a flash, as she lay awake in the dark, thinking. A flash that seemed to light up the whole room, with a horrid ruddy glow. She had been thinking: It may be better, for Ken’s sake, that this has happened to Parker, that he’s out of the way now. It’s like a load off my mind. Because I’ve been dreading for weeks and months past now, that this very thing might happen some day. Only it would be Ken who—

And then the flash came.

Why should he be self-conscious in front of me when he first read it tonight?

Why should be take such a long time to show it to me? Why not instantly?

He told me once he never forgives an injury.

He’s done it once already, there, before we were married.

Even to herself she never said “St. Louis.”

She propped herself up on her elbow, turned toward him. She stretched out her hand to touch him, but something seemed to hold it back, she couldn’t make it go all the way. “Ken,” she whispered fearfully.

He was either fast asleep or he didn’t hear the faint breathing of his name.

No, I’d better not ask him, she thought. How can I ask him? To ask him about this would be like reproaching him for that other time. I’ve made my vow, and I must keep it. Never to speak of it, never.

She forced herself to lie back again. She pressed her hand tightly to her mouth, held it that way, as if to smother the horrid question that kept trying to force its way out.

“It isn’t so,” she said to herself over and over again. “It can’t be. He was out drinking that night. Only out drinking.”

And then an insidious afterthought, as if malignantly hovering about waiting its opportunity, forced its way in.

“But where was he out drinking that night? Where did he go?”

The next night he was sitting there in the room with her reading the paper.

She spoke at last. For five whole minutes she’d been trying to. “Ken. Where — what bar did you go to, that night you — came home like that?”

He took a minute’s time. “I don’t remember,” he said, through the newspaper like a screen.

“Quinn’s, down by the corner?”

“No,” he said. “Further away. Some bar or other. I don’t remember.” He gave the newspaper a shake, as if to say: Stop this.

She daren’t go any farther. Why should he go farther away than Quinn’s? In Quinn’s they’d trust him for a drink or two. Elsewhere they wouldn’t. And he must have had quite a few that night.

“Did they get him yet?” she asked presently.

“Who?”

“Whoever did that. You know, Parker.” She turned to look at him as she asked it, drying a dish with its rim held pressed into her midriff. She could only see the top of his forehead, the paper hid his face from there down.

“No,” he said tonelessly. “Not as far as I see.”

“They will in a day or two, I suppose?” she suggested. “They always do.”

“Not always,” he said curtly. Neither forehead nor paper moved. He must have stopped reading, or the one would have slowly climbed above the other as his eyes went down the page.

She turned away again, put the dried plate down atop the others. They didn’t once, she agreed silently. In St. Louis.

He roamed restlessly about for awhile, stood here, stood there. Finally he said, “Think I’ll take a little walk, get some air.”

“You’d better cover up good,” she warned. “It’s ice-cold out. Your coat is like tissue paper. Put your sweater on underneath.”

But when he’d done so, he complained, “I can’t wear both things. Too bulky.” And he took the coat off, and left just the sweater on. He went out, and it stayed there where he’d flung it, carelessly rumpled on a chair.

She got a clothesbrush, and drew the coat across her lap, and started to dust it off a little. She turned the linings of the pockets out, to rid them of the debris, the tobacco grains and clotted bits of wool that she knew by experience were likely to adhere along their seams. A crumpled scrap of pale-green paper clung to one of them even after it had been reversed, and she plucked it off. It was nothing, only a trolley-car ticket.

Her clothesbrush halted again after a single upward stroke. Funny he should take a trolley, when the subway was so much more accessible to where they lived, and so much faster. She picked it up again from where she had discarded it, and straightened out the creases so that it expanded to twice its length.

Why, this wasn’t even a downtown line, she could tell by the list of transfer points running down one side of it, under the heading “Not Good if Detached.”

The coat fell off her lap and she stepped over it in moving across the room, forgetful of the fact that she had just been about to brush it. The newspaper was on the table where he’d thrown it when he finished with it, but she didn’t want that one, she wanted the previous night’s. She found it thrust away in a receptacle with paper bags and things.

Two words out of all the hundreds it contained were all she wanted, and she found them quickly, for she knew which text they were imbedded in. “...Garrett Parker, of 25 Fillmore Avenue, South...”

The ticket’s date, printed in red, was that of two nights ago, the night he had been out drinking. It had a double row of little boxes, each with a numeral in it, to mark the exact hour of issuance. The upper ones were for A.M, the lower for P.M. The “10” of the bottom row had been neatly punched through with a little round hole. She wouldn’t have known which it was, only the “9” was still there on one side of it, the “11” on the other. The time of Parker’s death had been between ten and half-past.

A blind interval, during which movement became automatic, unrecorded, followed. She was standing before the stove, holding the pilot key out so that the light flared wide, thrusting the pale-green ticket into it. Her face was that of a desperately sick woman.

“Now I know,” she kept saying to herself over and over. “Now I know.”

She put out the lights and raised the window shade.

It was a night like any other night. There was no moon, but there were stars.

Two nights later she saw the name for the first time, this stranger’s name that meant nothing to her. Pulled out of thin air.

“They got him,” Ken said abruptly. And she thought she heard him give a long sigh.

She ran over quickly beside him, to read. They had arrested a man named Considine, on the accusation of having killed. Parker. He’d worked for Parker; not in Ken’s time, but more recently, a few short weeks ago. He’d been unjustly discharged. He’d borne a grudge. It was Ken’s case all over again, almost terrifyingly so. Just with a change of names. He couldn’t prove where he’d been that night, around ten to half-past. He said he’d gone out and had a few drinks, and couldn’t remember. She was almost terrified by the similarity.

That was about all there was to it. It was only a small item at the foot of a back page. But it meant so much in someone’s life. In theirs too, for that matter. Immunity from now on. She could see him go out on the streets now without that cold terror in her heart. She could hear a knock at their door, or a heavy tread coming up the stairs, without dying a little.

“He denies he did it, Ken,” she said mournfully, without meeting his eyes.

“They all do,” he said callousedly. “You don’t expect him to admit it, do you?” He put the paper aside, stood up. “Let’s go out to a movie,” he said. “I... I feel a lot better tonight.”

It came creeping back that night in the dark, the banished named. Considine. Just an abstract name in a newspaper. Jones, Smith, Brown, Considine. She said to herself, “I must forget this name. I must say, ‘It doesn’t belong to anyone real. There is no such man.’ ”

She tossed and turned restlessly in the bed.

There is no such man, there is no such man, there is no such—

But it kept pounding at her mercilessly, like the throbbing of a drum. “Considine. Considine. Considine.”

He was working again. They’d taken him back at his old place, now that Parker was out of the way. His wages were exactly two-thirds of what they had been when he was with the concern the time before. But the world about them, beginning to struggle painfully up out of the depths, had found new standards of contentment, frugality, simplicity. Safety, security, came drifting back within sight on the troubled waters, but never again the old expansiveness.

They discontinued accepting relief almost with his first pay check. They were compelled to, under penalty of prosecution, but thousands postponed doing so as long as they could. But with him it was almost a physical restorative, an aid to convalescence. His step became firmer, quicker. The old, open untroubled width of eye returned. Slowly the soreness of spirit was eased, the bitterness was mellowed, as he basked in the renewed illusion of being of some use in the world, as under therapeutic rays.

Even heartiness, gayety, began to peer tentatively forth again at intermittent times, as when he brought her home his pay envelopes on alternate Saturdays. What they contained stood for so much more than the intrinsic value of the money they held.

“Why can’t I get you to smile any more?” he asked wistfully, as she looked down at it in her lap where he’d dropped it.

“I do smile — look — I do. I smile whenever you do, like I always did.”

“But it doesn’t go in. It doesn’t go inside.”

(“He had a job too, poor soul,” she thought.)

The name had vanished again from the newspapers, after that first brief mention — it seemed like months ago, or was it only weeks? It was such a minor, unimportant case after all. She never went near the papers any more while he was present. But once or twice, when they were preparing for bed, she made some excuse to go back into the other room in her nightgown, stand hurriedly searching through them for a moment before putting the light out. There was never any mention of it that she could find. But still he’s real, she told herself, returning wraithlike to where her own husband lay safe in the darkness; he’s real, he’s somewhere.

One night she asked, “Whatever became of that man they arrested — on account of Parker? Are they still holding him?”

“They must be. I haven’t read of his being released.”

“All this time in jail,” she thought, “while we—”

And suddenly within a week, as if her question had been ill-omened, had released pent-up evil forces held in abeyance all the while, they read of his being brought to trial. It wasn’t a celebrated crime, it wasn’t given much space. Things like that were happening all the time in a big city such as theirs, people charged with murder being tried for their lives. In the standard-sized paper that he habitually brought home there were never any pictures, as least not of that sort of thing. But once he happened to bring a tabloid in addition; not that he had bought it, but someone had left it on the subway seat next to him and it was practically uncreased. And this was two-thirds pictures and very little text, and all of that very sort of thing.

Leafing unsuspectingly through it, she looked up, stunned.

“What’s the matter?”

“He has a wife,” she said aghast, as though she’d seen a ghost. “I didn’t know that until now.”

“Who? Oh, Considine. What made you think he hadn’t?” And after a moment he added, “Even murderers have wives.”

Ah yes, she agreed to herself, with poignant bitterness. Yes, Kenneth Mitchell, you’re right, even murderers have wives.

That night she had a terrifying dream, in which a stranger’s face hovered over her as she lay. there. The face of a strange woman, stricken with grief. It bent low above her own. “You have your husband,” it whispered balefully. “Where is mine?”

She turned her face feverishly, to try to avoid the accusing sight.

“Murderess!” hissed the phantom. “Murderess!”

“I didn’t do it,” she breathed tormentedly. “He did.”

“He killed Parker. But you are the one who is killing my husband. By remaining silent. You, not he! Murderess, murderess!”

She awoke with a stifled scream, and fled from the bed, and ran to the window and stood there looking out.

Her breast was rising and falling convulsively, and there was cold moisture on her face. She’d always had such a strongly developed feeling of sympathy for other women.

It was a night like any other night. Without a moon, and without stars.

She found herself looking at the house from the opposite side of the street. Its cracker-box outline, its canary-brick facing, dim with soot, looked so prosaic, so matter-of-fact. It was just a flat like thousands of others, all over the city. On nearly every street you could see one just like it.

She tried to tear herself away, and she couldn’t. She wondered: behind which one of those windows is she sitting, agonized, stifling her pain? Waiting for the night to come. He dies tonight; tonight is his last night.

I’m the only one can save him. If I go on my way now, if I go home, nothing can save him; he’ll surely die tonight. If I come back tomorrow, it’ll be too late. He’ll be gone, then, and nothing can bring him back.

She crossed the street, against the traffic, dazedly, like a sleepwalker. She went up to the door, pulled it open, went inside. She was in a grubby hallway that smelled of dust and stale cooking. She went over to the letter boxes and lowered her head, scanning the names.

A janitress came out from behind the stairs carrying a pail of water. “Who did you wish to see, Missus?”

“Considine. Are they — is she still living here?”

“Sure. She’s up on the third. You know her?”

“No,” Frances said simply. “I felt I — had to see her. I feel sorry for people in trouble.”

The janitress nodded. “Yes, that’s trouble, all right.”

“What’s she like?” Frances asked.

“Like you. About your age. Nice little body. She was so happy with him before it happened. She had another baby since they took him to jail.”

“She’s taking it hard, I suppose?”

Again the janitress’ choice of an illustration was deadly. “Wouldn’t you? He was all she had.”

She had once been about Frances’ own age. She was a crazed automaton now, beyond calculations of age or personality. She seemed unable to stand entirely straight, even in the narrow door opening. She stood bowed forward, as if a heavy lodestone were suspended from her neck.

“You don’t know me,” Frances said. “I’d like to talk to you. Please let me come in. I’d like to talk to you.”

The woman in the doorway said listlessly, “Come in.” Her dazed mind evidently couldn’t grasp the fact that Frances was a complete stranger to her.

She began to cry again as soon as the door was closed. It had become so continuous by now there was scarcely any facial change went with it; just a renewed dimming of the puffy eyes and then a glistening track down the cheek. She said, as though she had known Frances a long time, “My sister is coming over to take the children and me back with her later, but she didn’t get here yet. But tonight! Oh, how am I going to stand it tonight?”

There was a little boy standing there, staring up at Frances. The mother patted the top of his head absently. “No, you go inside. Don’t come in here. Stay inside and play with the baby like I told you.”

She turned to Frances when he had gone. “He doesn’t know,” she choked. “How can I tell him? He keeps asking. He keeps asking all the time where he is.”

Frances kept opening and closing the frame of her handbag. Over and over, incessantly, without looking at it.

The other woman’s voice rose, strangulated. “What harm has that child done? I’m not asking anything for myself, but is it right to take that child’s father away from him? Is that what the Law is for, to punish innocent children?”

“Don’t,” Frances breathed expiringly, and covered her ears. “I can’t stand it.”

The woman turned toward the window. It looked out on a whitewashed brick shaft. The wall was blue with shade now nearly all the way up, only at the very top was their still a triangular wedge of crimson sunlight, shaped like a guillotine blade. She pointed to it, held her shaking arm extended full-length. “Look how fast it goes, that sun,” she groaned. “Why doesn’t somebody stop it? Oh, why doesn’t somebody make it stay still?”

Frances impulsively stepped close to her, took her shoulders, gently tried to turn her away. She resisted passively. Her waist and shoulders turned under the coaxing pressure, but her face remained stubbornly fixed on the evaporating patch of sunlight out there. “That’s his last sun,” she whimpered. “That’s the last time he’ll ever see it. Don’t let them take the sun away from him. Oh, miss, whoever you are, don’t let them!”

Frances drew her to a chair, sat her down in it. She stroked her disheveled hair back from her brow. She brought a little water in a glass, held it for her to drink. “Sh-h-h-h,” she whispered on a long-drawn breath. “Sh-h-h-h.”

“I was up to see him Sunday,” Mrs. Considine murmured presently, quieting a little. “I said goodbye Sunday. I don’t know how I got back here. If I hadn’t known my children were here waiting for me, if my brother-in-law hadn’t been with me on the train— Oh, that awful train ride! The wheels kept going around in my head. They kept saying, ‘Goodbye forever, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye—’ ”

Frances winced, and, bending down over her from behind the chair, tilted her own face for a moment, ceilingward, as if in supplication of some sort of guidance neither one of them could see.

“Did he—” She could barely make herself heard. “Did he— say it wasn’t he — he didn’t?”

“He told me again, like he’s told me from the beginning. He swore it to me by our two children. He didn’t, he didn’t; he never went near that man. I know he’s telling the truth. You’d have to know my Al like I do. He wouldn’t lie to me, my Al wouldn’t lie to me. It isn’t in him to do that to anyone; I know him too well. He only went out for a few beers that night; is there any harm in that? Just that night he had to go. I even said to him, ‘Al, don’t go tonight.’ Never dreaming. You know, just because I wanted him to stay around, I was lonely. But he went to look up his friend Nick Mano. That’s a friend of his, Nick Mano. And just that night Nick had to be out. If he’d only been with him, they wouldn’t have been able to say — but he waited around for him. And that’s when it happened.” The figure in the chair rocked desolately to and fro. “But who is there will listen? Who is there will help me? Who can help me?”

I can, Frances thought. I can, I alone. Only I. It was as though a bright, cold light had suddenly been turned on. Everything, the outlines of things, the room about her, the woman in the chair immediately below her, suddenly seemed so clear, crystal-clear, diamond-clear, where until now they had been hazy, blurred by her own turmoil. Everything seemed so lucid, so logical, so — inevitable.

The other woman’s voice droned on, in its litany of misery. “The last words he said to me Sunday, his very last words when they were making me leave, were, ‘I didn’t do it, Frances. They’re taking me away from you for something I didn’t do.’ ”

“Is that your name?” Frances shuddered violently. “My God!” she moaned low.

The woman’s sobbing singsong continued. Suddenly she turned her head questioningly toward the back of the chair. “Miss—?” she called out wonderingly. “Miss—?”

There was no one standing there any longer. The room was empty. The door hung cryptically open.

Suddenly she found herself in a phone booth. Somewhere, she didn’t know where. It seemed so simple, so easy. A little light went on, to see by. She found a nickel and she dropped it in. Just like when you wanted to phone the grocer or the butcher. No different. So easy, so simple, so compulsory.

A voice said, “Police Department, good evening.”

She said, “I want to talk to someone about that Parker case. What they’re killing that man for tonight. I don’t know how to go about it—”

“Just a moment.” Another voice got on. It wasn’t a frightening voice. It was impersonal, but it wasn’t severe, or bullying, or anything. It was just like — well, once she’d had to call up one of the department stores about making an exchange; it took patience, but she’d finally succeeded in making herself understood. “Yes, ma’m. Now, what is it?”

She said, “It’s about that Parker case. He didn’t do it. That man they’re — putting away tonight. Considine. He didn’t do it. You must believe me—”

The voice was calmingly reasonable. First things first. “Would you give me your name please?”

You had to give your name when you were asked it by a police official, even over the telephone wire. It never occurred to you not to. The habit of being law-abiding, of never having anything to hide or fear, saw to that. “I’m Mrs. Kenneth Mitchell.”

The voice showed approving consideration. “And what is your address, please, Mrs. Mitchell?”

“Forty Forthway.” Then she added, gratuitously, “Apartment C.” The stores always liked that, when you gave the exact flat number. It made it easier for them to deliver. It seemed to add plausibility now.

“Yes, Mrs. Mitchell. And now you say—?”

“He didn’t do it. Considine. I know it, oh, I know it! You’ve got to listen to me. I wouldn’t have done this, if I weren’t sure—”

“What makes you think that, Mrs. Mitchell?”

“Because... because—” She floundered, helpless. “Because I know he didn’t. I know.”

The voice was considerate, patient, willing to give her a fair hearing to almost any lengths. “But you must have some reason for such a belief, Mrs. Mitchell.”

“I have,” she protested tearfully. “I have.”

“Then what is it, Mrs. Mitchell?”

Somehow she found herself in a verbal corner. She couldn’t seem to extricate herself, go back along the way she’d entered and thus get out again. She hadn’t thought this far ahead. There were two parts to the act of vindication. Exoneration. And then substitution. But she only realized that now. She hadn’t taken the second one into her calculation, visualized it. And they were indivisible, the two.

The voice persisted, nudging her, nudging her ever so gently. Not allowing her to stand still in her cul-de-sac. “But what is your reason for thinking Considine didn’t do it, Mrs. Mitchell? How can you be so sure?”

“Because— Because—” There wasn’t any other way. It had to be one or the other. To be believed at all. And to be believed was uppermost in her tormented mind just then. Overshadowing every other consideration. “Because my own husband did it.”

The voice showed no dramatic alteration whatever. It continued on its even tenor. It still seemed reluctant to believe her. Perhaps having found this attitude to be the most profitable up to now, it shrewdly continued with it, “Are you sure of what you’re saying, Mrs. Mitchell?”

It was easier from there on. She began speaking more volubly, in the effort to convince him. “Yes! Yes! I am. Oh, I am. He worked for Parker for years. He was unjustly discharged; we’ve been through a lot of hardship on Parker’s account. He often said he would, and I know he meant it. Oh, I can’t remember every little thing now any more — I found a trolley-car ticket in his pocket that he used that night—”

“Have you kept this?”

“No, I didn’t. I did away with it.”

The voice said, almost skeptically, “You haven’t anything more conclusive than that, then?”

“No. But I know he did it. I know what I’m saying. Oh, don’t let them kill that man! You’ve got to stop them.” She had to beat down his disbelief, his obtuseness; why didn’t his voice change, why didn’t he get excited, interested? Didn’t they care? “Don’t you believe me? I know!” she kept repeating.

“Yes, but how? Why?”

“Because he did it once before.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he told me!” She was almost beside herself. “He told me the night we became engaged. They never found out, but he told me about it. That’s why I know he did it this time too.”

“And how long ago was this, this first time?”

Oh, why was he so thick, so stupid? What difference did time make? “Ten years before we were married. In St. Louis.”

“And you’ve been married?”

“Three years.”

“Thirteen years ago, in St. Louis,” the voice said with judicial impartiality. She could somehow sense that a pencil point was moving over paper; some slightly absent inflection of the voice gave her that. “But you have no way of knowing whether that’s true, either; simply that he told you that. Is that right?”

“But he wouldn’t have told me, if it weren’t. Why would he have told me that? The man’s name was Joe Bailey; I’ve never forgotten the name.”

“Joe Bailey,” the voice repeated mechanically.

“Don’t you see?” she pleaded tearfully. “All I’m trying to get you to do is have them stop that thing tonight! It mustn’t be carried out. Even if it’s only a postponement— Oh, please; I don’t know the man, I’ve never even seen him. But I can’t sleep thinking about it—”

But to the end his voice never changed, woke up; she couldn’t seem to impress it on him that she was telling him the truth. “I understand, Mrs. Mitchell. I don’t know whether there’s anything I can do, but I’ll see. But you haven’t given us very much to go by.” It pondered briefly. “Perhaps it might be better if you’d come down here. If you’d care to give us your statement personally—”

Suddenly she was frightened. In a new way. You didn’t just step into a booth on your homeward way, put through a call, and secure the reprieve of a condemned man. There was more to it than that. You became involved, tangled up; your own life interfered with. Worst of all, he’d find out about it. It was like a dash of cold water full in the face. The clear white flame of altruism was quenched, went out with a hiss of sudden personal fear. The old blurredness came back, of before her visit to the Considine flat.

“Oh, no, I can’t!” she gasped. “I can’t make it. I... I have to go home and fix supper — he’s waiting for me — I’m late—”

She hung up. She came out of the booth, staggering a little. Almost at once a telephone started ringing behind her, where she’d just come from. It frightened her all the more, and she started to run. She ran all the way. She ran until her hat fell off, and she left it there behind her. She ran, and a sobbing voice kept saying over and over somewhere inside her, “I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it!” She ran until the night around her had fogged with her own exhausted exertion, and she couldn’t see which way she was going any more.

Then suddenly he had stopped her, on the sidewalk out in front of their home. She ran straight into his arms, without seeing him.

He said, “Frances!” and his arms were around her and the whole thing vanished. The whole thing she’d been fleeing from.

“I didn’t mean it, Ken!” she panted distraught. “Ken, I didn’t mean it!”

“Why, because you’re late? What’s so terrible, what’s the difference? Don’t take it like that. As long as you’re here now.” He took her upstairs with him, carrying her, holding her feet off the ground. “I didn’t know what happened to you. I was starting to get uneasy. But it’s all right now.”

And there was the lamplight of home around her, and the whole thing — back there — was just like a bad dream.

“Let me fix your supper. No, I’ve got to fix your supper. They can’t take this away from me.” She went into the kitchen, and squatted on her heels before the stove, and thrust the broiler-pan with meat on it into its proper rack.

He followed her and looked at her searchingly. “Something’s the matter. You’re not well.”

“They can’t take this away from me,” she kept repeating. Then she said, “She’s happy now. I gave all this back to her. She’ll have this again now, herself.”

“Who’s happy?” He put his hand across her forehead, as if to test its temperature. “Frances,” he pleaded. “Don’t frighten me like this. Something’s happened to you. You’re hysterical. Won’t you tell me what it is? You saw a bad picture. You were nearly run down on the street. Won’t you tell me?”

She tried to struggle to her feet, and he tried to help her. Suddenly she sagged limply backward into his arms, and he caught her and kept her from falling. “I’ve given it back to her,” she breathed. “Oh, Ken,” she whispered, “Ken, I dreamed I did a terrible thing.” Her eyes dropped closed, and she lay inert, pressed against him.

He had her on the sofa when she opened them again. She was lying on the sofa, and he was crouched there beside her, holding her hand between his, his face anguished.

“Ken—”

“Sh, lie quiet now. Don’t talk. The doctor’ll be here soon. I phoned him to come over.”

“They can’t take this away from me,” she breathed. She tried to turn her head a little and look out past the obtruding sofa arm. “Ken, your supper— The table, not set yet— The meat, it’s been in too long— Ken, I’ve never been so late with you before—”

She tried to struggle upright, and he pressed her gently back. “No, never mind now. Just lie still, lie quiet—”

“Ken—”

“He’ll be here soon. What is it? What hurts you?”

“The whole world, Ken,” she whispered. “The whole world hurts me.”

Suddenly recollection, like a galvanic electric shock, coursed through her. He couldn’t hold her prone any more. She jolted upright, fastened her hands to the revers of his coat, shook him imploringly. “Ken, it wasn’t a dream—! It happened! Quick, the valise—!”

He tried to restrain her, while she struggled, strove against him.

“Our valise — the big one — where is it? Get it out. No, you’ve got to listen to me! Bring the valise in here. Hurry, Ken. Get out your things. And mine—”

The sudden pounding was like surf breaking against a rocky shore, and coming back again and back and back.

Her arms whipped inextricably around his neck like a knot. Like the knot of a hangman’s noose.

He tried to regain his feet. “It’s only the doctor. But why does he make so much noise—?”

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t go! Don’t go near it!”

“I’ve got to let him in. I sent for him.”

“No,” she groaned, in an access of disemboweling terror. “Don’t go!” She wouldn’t loosen her arms. She held him down there by her, in a headlock, with convulsive strength. “Stay here with me like this. Let me hold you tight like this. Oh, make it last, I want it to last—”

He had to exert all his strength to pry her grip loose. And then he burst the embrace and left her fallen draggingly, from sofa seat to floor, one arm still extended after him in futile desperation. And he was gone.

She couldn’t call out, she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t even see any more. She could only listen. As to the resonance of a knell.

A door opened. “You’re under arrest for the murder of Joseph Bailey, in St. Louis, Missouri, thirteen years ago.” And then, “Your own wife.”

She tottered to her feet, and staggered after him, arms feeling the way for her blinded eyes. She came up against the front of someone’s gray suit — but Ken’s was a blue one — and someone held her, propping her like a sort of spindly, life-sized doll without any bones in it.

And then that voice, tomblike, guttural with all the pain and all the dismay and all the heartbreak there have ever been in the whole world, since the first man loved the first woman. And the first woman loved the first man.

“Frances, Frances, what have you done to me?”

Calling out to her, calling, in haunting supplication, as it receded from the room, from her life, from her love, forever.

“Fran-ces, Fran-ces, what have you done to me—?”

Fading away at last into the irretrievable distance.

Somebody kept holding her up, somebody anonymous, somebody in a gray suit.

“But have they saved Considine at least? At least have I done that much?”

“Considine was executed half an hour ago. He made a full confession of guilt fifteen minutes before he went to the Chair.”

She was slipping down the front of the gray suit, it seemed to go rushing up past her. Her thoughts exploded into white-hot particles of agony, that slowly cooled and went out one by one.

“I will be silent as the grave, dear heart. Silent as the grave forever. For now indeed I am one.”

It was a night like any other night. There was no moon; there were no stars.