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He did not answer that.

He put down his glass, still eying her steadily.

“When I look at you,” he said, “it doesn’t seem possible that you would wreck a man’s life—as you have mine.”

She made an impatient gesture.

“You seem to have done very well by yourself. Why be dramatic?”

But I think she had still some idea of using her sex against him. She had never learned that lost lovers do not return, and after all he had loved her a long time. She sat on the arm of a chair and carefully tucked her negligee about her, so that it outlined her body; and it must have shocked her when he spoke again.

“There ought to be a particular hell for your sort of woman,” he said slowly. “God knows I loved you, but you took my pride and crushed it. You killed something in me. And now you’re fastened onto me like a leech, and, by heaven, I can’t get rid of you.”

She stopped posturing then, and her face hardened.

“Then what are you going to do?”

He told her, brutally but frankly, what he had told me. There would be no lump sum. The depression had ruined us all. He couldn’t earn enough to support his family and keep her in luxury at the same time. She could take less money, or he would go to court and apply for relief.

“Luxury!” she said. “On twelve thousand a year?”

She was more reasonable after that, however, although she was both angry and resentful. What she wanted, she said, was to leave America and never come back. She liked Europe, and there was a little place in the south of France that she could buy cheaply. Also she could get a good rate on foreign bonds, and living cost very little. With a lump sum—

“What’s the matter with you?” he said roughly. “I know you pretty well, Juliette. You don’t want to leave this country. It suits you down to the ground. What have you done that you’ve got to clean out? For that’s it, isn’t it?”

She went pale, but her voice was calm enough.

“You would think that,” she said. “I haven’t done anything. I’m just fed up.”

“And what do you think I am?” he retorted. “I’m fed up to the teeth.”

It was the impasse again, and at last she gave up. She rose and pulled her dressing gown around her.

“Better think it over,” she said. “And I don’t mean maybe.”

She went out on that, and again I heard the click of her mules as she went up the stairs.

It was the last time I ever saw her.

On account of the servants I put Arthur in the hospital room that night. He had ridden part of the way from the flying field on a truck, he said, and walked the rest; and he meant to leave early the next morning. He was already yawning when I took him up, but he looked around him curiously.

“Queer to be back here, isn’t it?” he said. “I feel like a kid again. Remember the time I brought the starfish in, and you yelled your head off? You yelled a lot, Marcia.”

“I could do a bit of yelling this minute.”

“Why?”

“Having to slip you into your own house and then sneak you out again. How are you going back, Arthur?”

He said he would leave before the servants were up, and thumb a ride back to the mainland. Then he saw the hatchet and picked it up curiously.

“Nice weapon to leave around,” he said. “What’s it doing here?”

But I did not want to add to his troubles. I made some vague explanation about the window not staying closed very well without a latch, and together we got the nails out again. When at last I said good night he was already preparing for bed. He said he would not undress, but merely sleep for a few hours; and I left him with a distinct feeling that he thought he had faced his own particular dragon and slain it.

I
T WAS THE NEXT MORNING
that Juliette disappeared.

I was late in getting to sleep and when I wakened and rang for Maggie it was after nine o’clock. Maggie told me that Juliette had already gone in riding clothes, taking the car as usual and leaving me high and dry so far as transportation was concerned; that Mary Lou had called me early, but said not to disturb me; and, characteristically keeping the best news for the last, that Lizzie whose room is at the rear of the house, had seen a man running across the driveway, a bareheaded man with a hatchet in his hand, at three o’clock that morning.

“She says it was a ghost,” said Maggie grimly, “but if you’ll give me that key I’ll see if that hatchet’s upstairs where we left it.”

I put her off for a minute, but my head was whirling. Nor was I any easier when, an hour or two later, Mike reported at the kitchen door with a hatchet in his hands. Either it was the one from the hospital room or its double, and I could scarcely control my voice.

“Where did you find it?” I asked him.

“Down at the edge of the pond,” he said. “At the upper end. It was half in the water.”

It was fortunate for me that Ellen went into hysterics just then, and that both Maggie and Lizzie had to look after her. It gave me time to go the third floor and see what had happened. I was shaking with anxiety as I climbed the steep stairs and opened the door. I do not know what I expected, but certainly it was not to find things almost exactly as I had left them.

The bed had been slept on but not in, and beside it was the book Arthur had carried up, a box of matches and two cigarette stubs on an ash tray. The bathroom was untouched, no towel had been unfolded and the basin was dry—which did not sound like fastidious Arthur. But the hatchet was not in sight, and there was only one incongruous thing in the room, and I stood staring at it with complete bewilderment.

On the bureau where he had left it the night before was Arthur’s soft felt hat.

That and the hatchet utterly destroyed any comfortable theory that he had merely left the house early that morning, and that Lizzie had seen him taking a hurried departure against an early dawn. Something had driven Arthur out of the house that early morning. But what? It was absurd to think of the bells, although there was one in the hospital suite which was connected with Mother’s closed room.

I was completely confused. William, diplomatically approached, had found all lower doors closed and locked. As a result I had to believe that for some unknown reason Arthur had left the house by his old method, leaving his hat and taking the hatchet with him! It was preposterous, and yet I knew somehow that it was true.

Then where was he? What had happened to him?

I was nearly frantic with anxiety. I remember that I smoothed the bed as well as I could and hid the hat under the mattress, but it was pure automatism. I was just in time at that, for Jordan appeared in the doorway at that minute. She had a wretched habit of wearing rubber-heeled shoes, and of appearing like a jack-in-the-box when she was not expected.

“I was to say, miss,” she said stiffly, “that Doctor Jamieson is here to see Ellen, and would you go down?”

She was not looking at me, however. She was staring past me into the room, with a sort of avid interest.

“Lizzie says she saw a man running around the place last night, miss. She saw him under that light on the driveway, and he had a hatchet in his hand.”

“I wish Lizzie would keep her mouth shut,” I said viciously.

But I saw that she was uneasy. She looked pale, and for some reason I felt sorry for her. Sorry for the slave Juliette had made of her, sorry for the vicarious life she led. I patted her on the arm, and I have been glad since that I did.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I told her. “Probably Lizzie had a nightmare.”

“I suppose I’m used to the city, miss,” she said, and shivered.

Ellen was quieter when, having locked the rooms again, I went downstairs. Juliette was still out, and I had left Jordan on the second floor. It was only later, in the library, that the doctor asked any questions.

“What’s all this nonsense about bells, Marcia?” he inquired. “And what about this man with a hatchet?”

“I suppose Lizzie is getting old,” I said evasively. “As to the rest, you know how it is. An old house—”

“Maggie says you left this hatchet in the quarantine room.”

“I thought so. I may be mistaken. Or it may not be the same one.”

Then he made my blood run cold, for he said: “Somebody up to Arthur’s old tricks with the trellis and the drain pipe, eh? I suppose Arthur himself wasn’t around?”

“With a hatchet?” I said. “And with Juliette in the house?”

“Well,” he said, and grinned. “If I were Arthur the conjunction wouldn’t be entirely surprising!”

I should have told him then and there. He had looked after me all my life, in the summer, and he had often said that in case he ever became delirious he was to be shut in a sealed room. He knew too much about us all. Arthur’s insistence on secrecy, however, was still in my mind. I merely smiled, and soon after that he loaded his bag and folded himself—he was a tall thin man—into his always muddy car and drove away.

It was after he had gone that I made a round of the grounds. But I found nothing. Mike showed me where the hatchet had been found, its head in the mud of the pond, but there were no footprints except his own.

“Looked as though it had been thrown there,” he said. “Anybody standing in the drive near the gates could do it.”

The excitement in the house was dying down. Ellen was sleeping under a hypnotic, the key to the hospital rooms was again in the drawer, and except that Lizzie was positive that the man with the hatchet had been chasing somebody or something, I had learned nothing whatever. But the bells chose that morning to ring again. They rang from all the rooms, indiscriminately, and I sent again for the electrician.

“Take out all the wires if you have to,” I told him, “or the servants will desert in a body.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the wiring, Miss Lloyd,” he told me. “Looks like somebody’s playing a joke on you. They don’t ring by themselves. That’s sure.”

It was at noon that the riding academy called up.

“I just wondered, Miss Lloyd,” said Ed Smith, “if Mrs. Ransom has come back?”

“Not yet, Ed. Why?”

“Well, I suppose it’s all right,” he said doubtfully. “But she’s about two hours over her time, and I like to keep an eye on my customers.”

“I wouldn’t worry, Ed. She knows how to ride.”

“She does that all right,” he agreed. “Good seat and good hands. Has a quiet mare too. Sorry to have bothered you. She’ll be coming in any minute probably.”

The car was still at the academy, so I was virtually marooned. I went upstairs and telephoned for the house supplies, meanwhile trying to put Arthur out of my mind. But I could think of nothing else. Something had roused him, he had picked up the hatchet and got out the window. Then what?

Even by plane, if he had kept the one that brought him, it was too soon for him to have reached New York. Nevertheless, I called his office, to be told that he was out on his sloop and had given no time for his return. It was only then that I remembered Mary Lou at Millbank, and at one o’clock I telephoned her there.

“How are you?” I said, as naturally as possible. “And how is Junior?”

“All right,” she replied. “What are the prospects, Marcia? How soon is she going? I detest this place.”

“I can’t tell yet. Pretty soon, I think. Any word from Arthur?”

“He’s left town to see about the boat. I suppose he’s got it out somewhere,” she said vaguely. “He called me the day before yesterday and told me. I do hope it doesn’t blow up a gale.”

I had entirely forgotten Juliette by that time; and it was something after one o’clock, when William was announcing lunch, that Ed Smith called again.

“I think I’d better tell you and get it over,” he said. “The mare’s just come back. She must have got away from Mrs. Ransom. She didn’t bolt. She’s as cool as when she went out.” And when I said nothing, he added: “I wouldn’t worry, Miss Lloyd. Mrs. Ransom probably just got off for something and the horse started home. I’ve sent a couple of boys up with an extra for her. She generally takes the same trail, over above Loon Lake.”

“Did she jump that mare?” I said sharply.

“I guess maybe she did, but those jumps are safe.”

Well up in our hills is a small cleared space with two or three low jumps built, and the trail Juliette usually took led to it. But, as Ed said, they were safe enough. I took them myself, had taken them ever since I was a child, and I had never heard of an accident.

“I’m going up myself,” he added. “What I want to know, will I send your car to you? It’s here and you may need it.”

I asked him to do so, and got my hat and a light coat. Then I saw William in the doorway, and told him.

“Miss Juliette’s horse has come back without her,” I said. “She is probably all right, but I’ll get the doctor and drive to the foot of the trail anyhow. I wouldn’t tell Jordan. Time enough when we know what’s happened.”

I must have been pale, for he made me drink a cup of coffee before I left. Then the car came in, and still dazed I was on my way to the doctor’s. Only one thought was in my mind. Had she or had she not told Arthur that she was riding that morning? I could not remember. All I could remember was his desperate face. “Now you’re fastened onto me like a leech, and, by heaven, I can’t get rid of you.”

I found Doctor Jamieson at his lunch, but he came with me at once. He put a bag into the car and, folding his long legs into the space beside me, gave me a whimsical smile.

“Don’t look like that, girl,” he said. “All I’ve got is a few bandages and some iodine. Probably neither of them needed at that. Most people fall off a horse sooner or later.”

His matter-of-factness was good for me. Then, too, once out of the house I felt less morbid. The weather had cleared and the air was bracing, almost exhilarating. The golf links showed a brilliant green on the fairways, and Bob Hutchinson was driving a row of balls from the ninth tee, with Fred Martin, the professional, standing by. Tony was just coming in with Howard Brooks, both looking warm and cheerful. They waved, but I drove on past and into the dirt road which led to the bridle path. At the foot of the trail I stopped the car, and the doctor gave me a cigarette and took one himself.

“Pretty spot,” he said. “Relax and look at it, girl. You’re tightened up like a drum.”