“But I—”
“Nonsense!”
The interviews always ended on the same note, and Ralph was still in Muskoka.
There were compensations, however. In the winter there was skiing and in the summer there was Joan Frost. Every June, July, and August Ralph, as the nearest male, was favored with Joan’s rather spasmodic attentions. Early this summer he had proposed, and Joan, after weighing Ralph’s assets — he was good-looking and had a substantial allowance — and his defects — he was a poor fish — had consented to marry him. In return Joan got a square-cut emerald ring and the satisfaction of seeing Miss Emily Bonner riled.
Miss Bonner did not like Joan. Her vocabulary, always vigorous, broke all records when Ralph stammered out the news of his engagement.
“A slut!” she shouted. “A hussy! A thief! The worthless offspring of a degenerate mother and an inept, pettifogging, embalmed old fossil of a father!”
Satisfied with this piece of rhetoric, Miss Bonner passed into a coma for the rest of the day. The next morning, greatly refreshed, she interviewed Joan Frost.
The results of that interview were not made public but close observers stated that old Emily was never the same from that day on. Her subsequent tirades lacked the old fire, and she was overheard telling the pastor of the Methodist Church in Clayton that she would be ninety come September.
In the house which adjoined Miss Bonner’s and was connected with it by the narrow lane running in from the main road Tom Little was talking on the telephone. The telephone was in the sitting room and Mary Little was in the dining room, so his remarks to Joan Frost were necessarily vague. He replaced the receiver with a sigh of relief and went back to his breakfast.
“Who was that, dear?” Mary asked in a sweet voice with just a trace of a whine.
“Some insurance agent,” Tom said with practiced ease. “Wanted to come out and see me about a policy. I said he could come but I wasn’t having any.”
“I heard what you said, dear.”
It was, Mary thought, getting more and more difficult to believe the best of Tom.
Tom’s thoughts were more specific: damn that gentle way she has of calling me a liar!
They had been married for ten years. At twenty-five Mary had been a tall, thin, plain-looking girl with a sizable fortune and a zeal for reform. At twenty-four Tom had been ripe for reform and in need of money. Dark, handsome, and rather dissipated, Tom was always attractive to women and it required more than marriage vows to dull his eye for a pretty face. There had been a procession of ladies, each one followed by a brief period of repentance. The latest was Joan Frost.
“Poor Tom,” Mary frequently said to the sinner, “you’re not really bad, you’re just weak.”
It was a charitable diagnosis and Tom accepted it eagerly and promised to become strong. But Tom at thirty-four was the same as Tom at twenty-four except for a slight paunch, a set of wrinkles, and a new method of parting his hair to hide the thin spots.
At present, the first of August, relations between the Littles were good. Tom was confident that he and Joan had been very discreet, and Mary was confident that Tom’s feelings for the young Frost girl were so far paternal.
“We have a new neighbor, Tom,” Mary said. “Some doctor from Detroit, I think Jennie said.”
Jennie Harris was the Littles’ general maid and a fund of information. She was nearly sixty, and probably one of the pioneers in the difficult art of listening in on six-party country telephone lines. Thus her range of knowledge was even greater than Hattie Brown’s since Hattie’s adenoids gave her away every time she lifted the receiver.
“Yes, I saw him,” Tom said absently.
“He only came last night, dear. When did you see him?”
“Last night.”
“Really? I didn’t know you were out last night.”
“I took a walk. Can’t I take a walk if I want to?”
“Why, of course, dear! I just wondered.”
Throughout the grapefruit there was silence. Tom did not like silences. He had learned from experience that they were hostile to him.
“A lot of Americans around this year,” he said. It was the best he could do but it elicited no response. “Funny they come all the way up here.”
Mary looked up reproachfully. “Funny! Why, I thought you loved it up here, dear. The only reason we took this place for the summer was because—”
“I like it,” Tom said hastily. “Mad about it. Lots of nice swells and things. Besides, it will be good for your heart.”
“But, Tom! We didn’t come here for me, we came here for you.”
“All right.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do like it. What are you arguing about?”
“Dear, I’m not arguing. You know I can’t argue on account of my heart!”
Miss Nora Shane, the occupant of the fifth cottage along the lane, was facing the east. In order to paint a sunrise she had struggled out of bed at five o’clock, missed her breakfast, fought off the hordes of mosquitoes and black flies who mistook her paints for something edible, and acquired a patch of sunburn on the tip of her nose. As an added humiliation the dispirited sun on her easel looked exactly like the dispirited sun that had risen out of the lake.
“Photographic,” Miss Shane said bitterly. “Hellish.”
She rubbed a paint-smeared hand absently along her nose. It was a good nose, small and straight beneath its redness. Everything about Miss Shane, except the frown on her forehead, was good. She had sharp blue eyes and a curved red mouth. Her hair, hanging down her back in two thick plaits, was as straight and black and smooth as an Indian’s. She was tall and slim, and even when she was stripping a sunrise from its moorings her movements were graceful. “Lousy,” said Miss Shane, sternly self-critical. “Photographic.”
For three full months Mr. Smith, who lived in the last cottage in the community, had eluded the efforts of all those who sought to penetrate his mystery. Since he rarely used the telephone Jennie Harris, the Littles’ general maid, could contribute nothing of interest about him. Since he had resisted the onslaught of Joan Frost, Hattie Brown was equally without knowledge. Even Miss Bonner’s field glasses merely revealed the fact that he went for a swim every morning at ten o’clock and was kind to his dog.
It was generally assumed, of course, that Smith was not his real name and that his horn-rimmed spectacles and his small black mustache were a disguise.
Although some of the residents resented the mystery, others, like Miss Emily Bonner, were grateful for the opportunity to speculate without fear of being contradicted by fact. Miss Bonner’s current opinion was that Mr. Smith was evading the police and that his dog had been stolen from an American millionaire and was being held for ransom. This belief was rapidly gaining on the “mad-scientist” theory of Miss Hattie Brown.
On the first of August Mr. Smith’s fortress remained unstormed, and he ate his breakfast in the exquisite privacy which he deserved.
Chapter Two
“I’m an airman,
I’m an airman,
I fly, fly, fly, fly, fly,
Up into the sky—”
The disembodied voice was floating out of the windows of the cottage between the Littles’ and the Frosts’. The most that could be said for the voice was that it was full of enthusiasm.
Miss Nora Shane heard it and was disposed to be critical. She set her campstool and easel on the ground, put her hand to her mouth, and yelled: “Oh, dry up! Dry up!”