“So you see,” said Donnelly, “that’s how it is. We’ve traced him that far. I know that there’s some woman in Stamford who has a good reason for wanting to get rid of him. And now—” He looked steadily at Ross. “And now I’ve about finished.”

“Finished?” said Ross. “You—you mean—”

But Donnelly did not answer.

XVI

Ross went upstairs to the sitting room over the garage. It did not occur to him to extend an invitation to his companion; he knew well enough that he would hear those deliberate footsteps mounting after him; he knew that Donnelly would follow.

He took off his hat and overcoat and flung himself into a chair, and Donnelly did the same, in a more leisurely fashion. Certainly he was not a very troublesome shadow; he did not speak or disturb Ross in any way. He just waited.

And Ross sat there, his legs stretched out before him, hands in his pockets, his head sunk, lost in a reverie of wonder, pity, and great dread.

“Her child?” he thought. “Amy’s child? Ives was her husband, and that baby is her child?”

He recalled with singular vividness the phrases of that pitiful, unreasonable letter. “Just let me see you.” “It’s been so long!” “You’re sick of me. All you want is to get rid of me.” He could imagine Ives, that fellow who was about his age, about his build—alone in his furnished room, writing that letter. “How can you be so damned cruel?” And “darling.”

“In a pretty bad state,” Donnelly had said. And he had come, with all his hope and his fear and his pain, to “Day’s End,” and—

“But if—if that was Ives I saw in Mrs. Jones’s room,” thought Ross, “then who was it Amy wanted me to watch for last night?”

This idea gave him immeasurable relief. That man had not been Ives. Ives hadn’t come yet. The whole tragedy was an invention of his own.

“No reason to take it for granted that that letter was meant for Amy,” he thought. “Plenty of other women in Stamford. No; I’ve simply been making a fool of myself, imagining.”

But there was one thing he had not imagined. There was, among all these doubts and surmises, one immutable fact, the man under the sofa. He could, if he pleased, explain away everything else, but not that.

 Prev. P 66/90 next