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I gave as jeering and mean a laugh as I could contrive-and succeeded so well that it startled even me. Craig jumped and stared at me. I said, “Anything, yes! Except tell her you still love her. And use your common sense about Nicky.”

“If she loves me,” he said slowly, “that’s enough.”

“I’ll bring her here,” I cried again. Practically with eagerness. “I’ll get rid of the trooper on guard-I don’t know how. But I’ll get her…”

“No,” he said again and firmly. “You’ll bring Alexia here. Now. If you please, Miss Keate.”

“Alexia! What on earth for?”

The queer look of speculation was in his face again. He said quite coolly, looking remarkably like his father in his more unpleasant moments, “Because I’m going to ask her to marry me.”

“Marry Alexia! But, good heavens…” I broke off. “If you think you’ll keep her from giving them the hypodermic that way…”

“Please go, Miss Keate.”

“But I…”

He lifted himself on his elbow; his eyes flashed and his chin and nose seemed to grow hawkier, if you understand me. He snapped crisply as a drill sergeant, “Do as I tell you! Bring her here!”

Well, I did it. I’ve never met a man yet that could make me change my mind; I obeyed him only because-oh, because I did. I was furious, too. I caught a glimpse of myself marching back out of the room with my red hair flaming and two bright spots of anger on my cheeks. But I got Alexia. She was in her room, undressing, and I had to watch her select a diaphanous creamy lace garment that set my teeth on edge and not because it courted pneumonia and, as to that, every possible rheumatic ailment. I only hoped, following her lovely figure and noting how seductively the creamy soft folds of lace and chiffon melted into it, that she would be thus attacked and succumb quickly. In fact, before she reached Craig’s room.

It was a wild hope. The trooper down at the end of the hall saw us and even at that distance I could see him snap to interested attention when his gaze fell upon Alexia. We reached Craig’s room and she swept straight to the bed and Craig said, “Alexia, did you give the police the hypodermic?”

“Why, I…” She settled down on the bed, sitting very close to him, her short, dark hair cloudlike and beautiful about her pointed, delicate face. “Yes, I did, Craig,” she said softly. She shot a glance toward me. “I thought I ought to. It was my duty. I gave it to Nugent tonight. He’s taking it to be fingerprinted. And to have the sediment inside the barrel tested for digitalis. I’m sorry, Craig, but I had to do it.”

“Yes,” said Craig slowly. “I suppose you had to. Well, you’ve done it now. Alexia, there’s something I want to ask you.”

“Yes, Craig.”

“Will you marry me?”

I shut my teeth so hard that I bit my tongue and uttered a stifled ejaculation which turned out, after I’d said it, to be highly profane. Alexia didn’t hear it, not that I would have been anything but pleased if she had, but she was leaning over toward Craig as if she couldn’t believe her ears. “Why, Craig!” she cried.

“Will you?” he demanded, his eyes holding her own intently and his profile exactly at that moment like a belligerent young hawk’s.

“Why, I-oh, Craig darling.” She hesitated. Then she seemed to get a kind of hold on herself and leaned over nearer him, lace and chiffon and all. “Oh, my darling,” she breathed. “At last…”

He pushed her away, rather abruptly, so I hoped she’d fall off the bed, but she didn’t. He said, “I don’t mean just sometime in the future. I mean now. Right away. Tomorrow.”

“But your father-Conrad-what will people say?”

“It doesn’t matter. They’ll not know. I can fix everything. Will you, Alexia?”

Which was just exactly more than I could bear. I whirled out of the door and gave it such a good hard bang behind me that the trooper away down at the end of the hall jumped three feet in the air, and came down facing my way and running, with his revolver in his hand.

We met at the stairway.

“Don’t hurt yourself with your revolver,” I said waspishly. “It was only a door.” And sat down on the top step to brood. Which was an unwise move because the more I brooded the more discouraged I got about it, and the more suspicious the trooper, eyeing me distrustfully from before Drue’s door, looked.

But it wasn’t long that I had to wait; in fact in a surprisingly short time Alexia came swirling out of Craig’s room, gave me the fraction of a glance and went quickly to her own room. I couldn’t see the look on her face very distinctly because of the distance between us and the dimness of the night lights. But it did strike me then that there was something surprised, yes, and a little disorganized in her usually poised and self-possessed manner;

I didn’t go to see Drue, then, either; I didn’t want to have to tell her anything. Morning would be all too soon for it to break over her head.

Well, I went back to Craig’s room because it was my duty as a nurse. And neither one of us actually spoke another word that night. I arranged his pillows, gave him one of the pills poor, dead Claud Chivery had left for him, and turned out the light beside his bed. He watched me-the queer, thoughtful look still in his eyes. He didn’t give me back the Miller checks, and I didn’t ask for them. I had enough clues on my mind-or rather, pinned to my anatomy-that I didn’t know what to do with without adding to them.

Again I folded up like an accordion on the couch. But not to sleep for a long time. Craig didn’t sleep either; I could tell by the way he turned and twisted. But I wouldn’t have given him an alcohol rub for all the emeralds in Barranquilla.

About three, Delphine turned up and yelled at the door, so I had to let him in. He created an unwelcome diversion by bringing in what looked like and was a newly deceased mouse. Before I could bring myself to dispose of the creature, Delphine did it for me with really horrid zeal and sat there licking his chops and enormous whiskers while Craig grinned from the pillows and looked all at once young and boyish and rather nice. Which paradoxically made me crosser than ever.

I went back to my couch without a word and eventually I slept. I neither knew nor cared about my patient’s slumbers, except I hoped they were troubled.

And in the morning early, just after Beevens brought in a breakfast tray for each of us, the police came.

It was as I had feared and known it would be. They came directly to Craig’s room and told him. The hypodermic had Drue’s fingerprints on it and mine. There was a very small residue of digitalis in the barrel-but enough to identify. They had informed the District Attorney of it and of her fingerprints on the drawer of the desk where Conrad had been accustomed to keep the missing medicine box (the medicine box that to me was anything but missing; I only wished it had been). Soper, over the telephone, demanded an immediate and formal arrest on a murder charge. But that wasn’t all. For it was then, when they sent a trooper to bring Drue into the room to be questioned (Craig, looking terribly white and drawn insisted upon hearing them question her), it was then that they found she was gone.

She had disappeared during the night; nobody knew when or how. In her cape and without her shoes.

I knew that, for it was I that counted the row of slender, sturdy little pumps and oxfords. She’d brought four pair, including some stub-toed red bedroom slippers. They were all there in a row.

You don’t go out into the night on purpose without shoes.

18

THE TROOPER, QUESTIONED, SEEMED dazed but insisted, looking frightened, that she couldn’t have passed him. There were no other exits from her room unless she got out the window and it was a sheer drop for nearly twenty-five feet with no shrubbery at that point to break a fall.

At noon they still hadn’t found her; the household was nightmarish that morning-at fantastic sixes and sevens, with Beevens red-eyed and Craig like a crazy man, his eyes blazing out of a hollow, drawn white mask. We made peace somehow, Craig and I, without knowing it, conscious only of Drue and that little row of slippers. No matter what the police said, I knew it wasn’t escape. Craig knew it, too.