“That is what worries me, Mr. Holcombe,” I said.  “I am helping the affair along and—­what if it turns out badly?”

He looked at me over his glasses.  “It isn’t likely to turn out badly,” he said.  “I have never married, Mrs. Pitman, and I have missed a great deal out of life.”

“Perhaps you’re better off:  if you had married and lost your wife—­” I was thinking of Mr. Pitman.

“Not at all,” he said with emphasis.  “It’s better to have married and lost than never to have married at all.  Every man needs a good woman, and it doesn’t matter how old he is.  The older he is, the more he needs her.  I am nearly sixty.”

I was rather startled, and I almost dropped the fried potatoes.  But the next moment he had got out his note-book and was going over the items again.  “Pillow-slip,” he said, “knife broken, onyx clock—­wouldn’t think so much of the clock if he hadn’t been so damnably anxious to hide the key, the discrepancy in time as revealed by the trial—­yes, it is as clear as a bell.  Mrs. Pitman, does that Maguire woman next door sleep all day?”

“She’s up now,” I said, looking out the window.

He was in the hall in a moment, only to come to the door later, hat in hand.  “Is she the only other woman on the street who keeps boarders?”

“She’s the only woman who doesn’t,” I snapped.  “She’ll keep anything that doesn’t belong to her—­except boarders.”

“Ah!”

He lighted his corn-cob pipe and stood puffing at it and watching me.  He made me uneasy:  I thought he was going to continue the subject of every man needing a wife, and I’m afraid I had already decided to take him if he offered, and to put the school-teacher out and have a real parlor again, but to keep Mr. Reynolds, he being tidy and no bother.

But when he spoke, he was back to the crime again:  “Did you ever work a typewriter?” he asked.

What with the surprise, I was a little sharp.  “I don’t play any instrument except an egg-beater,” I replied shortly, and went on clearing the table.

“I wonder—­do you remember about the village idiot and the horse?  But of course you do, Mrs. Pitman; you are a woman of imagination.  Don’t you think you could be Alice Murray for a few moments?  Now think—­you are a stenographer with theatrical ambitions:  you meet an actor and you fall in love with him, and he with you.”

“That’s hard to imagine, that last.”

“Not so hard,” he said gently.  “Now the actor is going to put you on the stage, perhaps in this new play, and some day he is going to marry you.”

“Is that what he promised the girl?”

“According to some letters her mother found, yes.  The actor is married, but he tells you he will divorce the wife; you are to wait for him, and in the meantime he wants you near him; away from the office, where other men are apt to come in with letters to be typed, and to chaff you.  You are a pretty girl.”