out of this,” Monk said curtly. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“Whose fault was it? If it hadn’t been for her, Myron Kane wouldn’t ever have thought of doing a story on father! He was mad about her in London last summer—father told me so. He says himself it’s the only reason he ever came here!”
Travis Elliot said, “If I were you, I’d shut up, Elsie.”
She turned furiously on him. “You’re a fine one to talk! After the smear campaign people put you through, everybody’d think you’d——” She stopped short, in a sudden silence that struck the room like a clap of thunder. “I’m sorry, Travis,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean that. I shouldn’t have——”
“It’s all right,” he said. His face was flushed a little. “Just get it straight, though. Nobody ever smeared me. People were damned decent to me. And if Laurel made a mistake, she didn’t do it on purpose. If you’d stow this holier-than-thou business, you’d make fewer yourself. I think you’ve said plenty, and if I were you I’d go home.”
Mrs. Whitney was lying back on her yellow pillows.
“All right,” Elsie Phelps said. When she looked at her aunt, her eyes were sharp pinpoints of anger. “When Aunt Abby feels better, maybe she’ll tell you what was in the sealed document Laurel gave Myron Kane. And why she’s so frantic to get it back.”
Mrs. Whitney’s hand moved slightly on the green blanket cover.
Monk Whitney turned abruptly. “What sealed document?”
He’d been looking out the window at the mirror reflecting his father’s doorway. I saw in it, as he must have done, the slim, auburn-crowned figure of the girl there, visible in the light from the hall as she took the key out of the lock and slipped quickly inside.
“What document?” he repeated.
Elsie Phelps laughed shortly. “Nobody ever heard of anything. Nobody knows anything. If Myron Kane was in this conspiracy of silence, it would be lovely. But he isn’t. You’d better go back and get another ribbon in the Pacific; you’ve never been any good anywhere else. You can kill Japs, but you haven’t got what it takes to keep one news reporter from disgracing your own family.”
He looked at her silently. There was an angry flush on Travis Elliot’s face as he turned and threw his half-smoked cigarette abruptly into the fire.
“I think we’d better go,” Sam Phelps said nervously. He went to Monk Whitney and put out his hand. “Sorry. Elsie’s upset. All this war work she’s doing——”
Monk Whitney smiled rather grimly. “I’m used to it, Sam. So long.”
Sam Phelps made a stiff bow to me and followed his wife out. There was complete silence in the room for an instant. Abigail Whitney opened her eyes then.
“Elsie is Very Trying,” she said. “I’ve always found it best not to listen to her. I Concentrate my Mind on Something Else.” She raised her hand toward me. “Dear Child, you want to go to your room. It’s upstairs, in back, or is it front? It’s wherever Myron isn’t, and I’m sure you can tell. Come down Again soon, won’t you?” She went on without a stop, “Travis, dear Boy, you must have a great many Things to do. I won’t keep you any longer—and close the door, it’s very drafty in here.”
Travis Elliot followed me out into the hall and did close the door. Then he looked at me with a smile. “You’ll get used to her.”
“I hadn’t realized she was an invalid,” I said.
He nodded. “She slipped on the ice eight years ago, and she’s never walked since.”
His face sobered. “It was coming from my father’s funeral. I’ve always felt sort of—— Well, you know. That’s not why I come here, though. I’m nuts about her. . . . Oh, I forgot.”
He turned back and knocked on the door, and I went on upstairs, to find the back room, or was it the front.
I knew the instant I pushed open the door that it wasn’t the back. My feet had made no sound on the thickly carpeted stairs. The girl kneeling on the floor beside the waste-paper basket, her back to me, her hair a shower of molten copper in the light from the desk lamp, was too intently occupied to be aware the door was opening until it was too late.
She started violently and flashed her head around, a breathless gasp parting her red lips, the defiance that had darted into her eyes changing to alarmed dismay at the sight of someone she didn’t know. I must have looked just as startled myself.
“Who . . . are you?” she stammered. Her face flushed crimson as she got to her feet in the middle of the litter of papers from Myron Kane’s wastebasket. Some of them were still in crumpled balls, and the ones she’d smoothed out to read had partly finished paragraphs on them, obviously discarded by Myron Kane as unsatisfactory.
“I’m Grace Latham,” I said. “I’m sorry. I was looking for my room.”
She took a step toward me. “You’re a friend of Myron’s, aren’t you? He’s talked about you. I’m Laurel Frazier. Maybe you can do something. That’s why Mrs. Whitney asked you to come, isn’t it?”
She stood there, her back to the desk, slim and really lovely, and still startled, the color in her cheeks heightened, her chin raised, not defiant now, so much as defensive. She didn’t look more than eighteen, in the Quakerish gray wool dress with a narrow white collar tied in a small bow at the throat. Her eyes were wide-set and the curious gray-blue of wood hyacinths, flecked with black. I could understand Travis Elliot and Myron Kane wanting to marry her more easily than I could Judge Whitney having had her as private secretary for five years. She looked more like a frightened, lovely child than an efficient young woman one took on a mission to London.
It was an extraordinarily embarrassing situation for both of us, and I didn’t really know what to say.
“I’m not a friend of Myron’s when he takes things that don’t belong to him,” I replied. I don’t know why I added, “It’s the—the document, I suppose?”
It seemed a silly thing to call it, but that was apparently what it was, the way they all referred to it.
The pulse in her throat quickened as she stared at me. “He . . . told you?”
I shook my head. “Judge Whitney’s daughter. Mrs. Phelps.”
“Elsie.” It was hardly more than a whisper, and the color ebbed sharply from her cheeks. “Then she was listening. I knew she was. I told him so.”
“Told——”
“Judge Whitney.” She said it mechanically. “Oh, it’s so awful! Now everybody—— And it’s my fault!”
She turned her head away, trying to keep back the tears that were glistening along her thick black lashes. I looked around the room. She’d done a thorough if slapdash job of searching it. The drawers of the dresser and the desk were pushed back crooked and the books and papers on the desk were pretty helter-skelter.
“If only I’d been careful!” she said. “And he’s being so wonderful about it. He keeps saying not to worry, it isn’t my fault
