“I’ll take a hypothetical case.
If you guess, you needn’t say. Of course
it’s a great secret.”
She listened, nodding now and then. He used
no names, and he said nothing of any crime.
“The point is this,” he finished.
“Is it better to believe the man is dead, or
to know that he is alive, but has cut himself off?”
“There’s no mistake about the recognition?”
“Somebody from the village saw him in Chicago
within day or two, and talked to him.”
She had the whole picture in a moment. She knew
that Mrs. Sayre had been in Chicago, that she had
seen Dick there and talked to him. She turned
the matter over in her mind, shrewdly calculating,
planning her small revenge on Elizabeth even as she
talked.
“I’d wait,” she advised him.
“He may come back with them, and in that case
David will know soon enough. Or he may refuse
to, and that would kill him. He’d rather
think him dead than that.”
She slept quietly that night, and spent rather more
time than usual in dressing that morning. Then
she took her way to the Wheeler house. She saw
in what she was doing no particularly culpable thing.
She had no great revenge in mind; all that she intended
was an evening of the score between them. “He
preferred you to me, when you knew I cared.
But he has deserted you.” And perhaps,
too, a small present jealousy, for she was to live
in the old brick Livingstone house, or in one like
it, while all the village expected ultimately to see
Elizabeth installed in the house on the hill.
She kept her message to the end of her visit, and
delivered her blow standing.
“I have something I ought to tell you, Elizabeth.
But I don’t know how you’ll take it.”
“Maybe it’s something I won’t want
to hear.”
“I’ll tell you, if you won’t say
where you heard it.”
But Elizabeth made a small, impatient gesture.
“I don’t like secrets, Clare. I
can’t keep them, for one thing. You’d
better not tell me.”
Clare was nearly balked of her revenge, but not entirely.
“All right,” she said, and prepared to
depart. “I won’t. But you
might just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who
it was she saw in Chicago this week.”
It was in this manner, bit by bit and each bit trivial,
that the case against Dick was built up for Elizabeth.
Mrs. Sayre, helpless before her quiet questioning,
had to acknowledge one damning thing after another.
He had known her; he had not asked for Elizabeth,
but only for David; he looked tired and thin, but well.
She stood at the window watching Elizabeth go down
the hill, with a feeling that she had just seen something
die before her.
On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return
from Chicago Lucy sat downstairs in her sitting-room
waiting for news.
At ten o’clock, according to her custom, she
went up to see that David was comfortable for the
night, and to read him that prayer for the absent
with which he always closed his day of waiting.
But before she went she stopped before the old mirror
in the hall, to see if she wore any visible sign of
tension.
