FullReads

She looked, and her twirling brain told her it was all a nightmare, but her eyes told her it was not. Here were five photographs, enlarged snapshots apparently: One, a profile view, showing her standing on a boardwalk, her hand held in the hand of the man she had known as Valentine C. Murrill; one, a quartering view, revealing them riding together in a wheel chair, their heads close together, she smiling and he apparently whispering something of a pleasing and confidential nature to her, the posture of both almost intimate; one, a side view, showing the pair of them emerging from an open-fronted cafe–she recognized the facade of the place where they had found the orangeades so disappointing–and in this picture Mr. Murrill had been caught by the camera as he was saying something of seeming mutual interest, for she was glancing up sidewise at him and he had lowered his head until his lips almost touched her ear; one, showing them sitting at a small round table with a wine bottle and glasses in front of them and behind them a background suggesting the interior of a rather shabby drinking place, a distinct impression of sordidness somehow conveyed; and one, a rear view, showing them upon a bench alongside a seemingly deserted wooden structure of some sort, and in this one the man had been snapped in the very act of putting his arms about her and drawing her toward him.

That was all–merely five oblong slips of chemically printed paper, and yet on the face of them they told a damning and a condemning story.

She stared at them, she who was absolutely innocent of thought or intent of wrong-doing, and could feel the fabric of her domestic life trembling before it came crashing down.

“Oh, but this is too horrible for words!” the distressed lady cried out. “How could anybody have been so cruel, so malicious, as to follow us and waylay us and catch us in these positions? It’s monstrous!”

“Somebody did catch you, then, in compromising attitudes–you admit that?”

“You twist my words to give them a false meaning!” she exclaimed. “You are trying to trap me into saying something that would put me in a wrong light. I can explain–why, the whole thing is so simple when you understand.”

“Suppose you do explain, then. Get me right, Mrs. Propbridge–I’m all for you in this affair. I want to give you the best of it from every standpoint.”

So she explained, her words pouring forth in a torrent. She told him in such details as she recalled the entire history of her meeting with the vanished Mr. Murrill–how a doctored telegram sent her husband away and left her alone, how Murrill had accosted her, and why and what followed–all of it she told him, withholding nothing.

He waited until she was through. Then he sped a bolt, watching her closely, for upon the way she took it much, from his viewpoint, depended.

“Well,” he said, “if that’s the way this thing happened and if you’ve told your husband about it”–he dragged his words just a trifle–“why should you be so worried, even if these pictures should reach him?”

Her look told him the shot had struck home. Inwardly he rejoiced, knowing, before she answered, what her answer would be.

“But I didn’t tell him,” she confessed, stricken with a new cause for concern. “I–I forgot to tell him.”

“Oh, you forgot to tell him?” he repeated. Now suddenly he became a cross-examiner, snapping his questions at her, catching her up sharply in her replies. “And you say you never saw this Mr. Murrill–as you call him–before in all your life?”

“No.”

“And you’ve never seen the mysterious stranger since?”

“There was nothing mysterious about him, I tell you. He was merely interesting.”

“Anyhow, you’ve never seen him since?”

“No.”

“Nor had any word from him other than that telephone talk you say you had with him?”

“No.”

“Did you ever make any inquiries with a view to finding out whether there was such a person as this Mrs. Beeman Watrous?”