"Well, what about it?" asked Bob. "What’s wrong?"
She whipped her head round.
"You don't see anything wrong?" she asked.
"No!" said Crystal. Yet Crystal was watching, watching steadily, restraining her feeling of sympathy.
A film of tears came over Irene Stanley's eyes. In her soul, if such a thing should happen to exist, she might have been laughing—and bleeding.
"They tell me, some of them," she hurried on, "that even in full daylight they don't notice it-much. Of course," she laughed, "they're just being kind. But three months ago you wouldn't have come near me. Oh, no! You think you would; but you couldn't have!"
Jean spoke softly, as though fitting together the past
"Plastic surgery," Jean murmured, and Cy too caught an echo of remembered words.
"I—I can't tell all this," the woman said, clasping her fingers together. "Especially since I'd be 'dead' to this day if Fred hadn't found me. Sir Henry!" she pleaded. "You're the only one who guessed. Tell them!"
H.M., about to fold his arms in aloofness, ended by adjusting his spectacles, glaring, and sitting down in an easy chair.
His look at the Manning children was ferocious.
"Well, my fatheads," he said, "it was the longest shot I ever made. I was scared green for fear it wouldn't come off. Because, d'ye see, I hadn't got the absolute smacking evidence I've got about the swimming-pool business. All I had was a kind of certainty, based on Manning's character, with a few other bits you've heard yourselves.
"Last night when he was reelin' off a fine oration in the library," continued H.M., "I had. rather a sour face. I did, for a fact I thought to myself, especially after hearin' about that conference in his office, I thought 'Son, this is all wrong. You're telling some truths mixed up with an awful lot of eyewash.'
"And the eyewash, I thought was mostly about his love affair.
"Mind, now!" H.M. continued. "I'm not saying any man, for eighteen years, could keep up a Browningesque devotion to a dead wife in all ways. He'd have an eye out, occasionally, for a neat bit o' goods. Oh, my fatheads! That happens"—H.M. coughed—"to the finest kind of men with—hem!—the best characters and the loftiest minds."
"But, "continued H.M., suddenly coming off the high horse and becoming reasonably human again, "I can tell you what Fred Manning wouldn't have done. This idealization of his, this Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, was a holy thing. It had burning sincerity. He lived for it. Ma'am," said H.M., "what's your real first name?"
The so-called Irene Stanley was sitting with her eyes closed. Tears trickled under the eyelids. "Elizabeth," she said.
Again emotions swirled, as palpably as currents. Jean sat down in an easy chair, putting her head in her hands.
"So I'll tell you," said H.M., "what Manning wouldn't have done—unless it was all hoo-haa intended to deceive. He wouldn't have made a splash, in front of his own family, by saying he was running away (probably forever) with a floozie whose vulgarity stimulated him so much. Who told you her name was Irene Stanley and all about her flooziness? He did. But do you remember his twisty smile when he said it last night? Oh, no! Fred Manning wouldn't have done that, unless it was hoo-haa. It simply wasn't in his character."
Jean, shaking with sobs, would not look up.
"Would anybody have thought it was in his character," she asked, "for him to—to embezzle money from that Foundation?"
"We-el! Regardin' that" H.M. frowned mildly, as though at some slight technical matter. "Has the District Attorney proved he did embezzle money?"
Again dead silence.
"Are you saying...?" Jean began.
"Shut up," said H.M.
"And last night," he went on, "he quoted Browning. He quoted Browning when he was (apparently) referring to his merry trollop. What's more, he quoted "The Flight of the Duchess.' That's the poem young Browning wrote, before he was married, to persuade Elizabeth Barrett to elope with him; and she did. Holy ground!
"And what had we just heard," inquired H.M., "about Fred Manning's dead wife? Only that there'd been a boiler-explosion aboard an old river boat; and she'd been drowned. The body, apparently, had never been recovered.
"But what does happen on one of those old boats, when a boiler explodes? What makes the boat go down? If s fire, y’see. If s fire. Now just suppose, for a minute, that Manning's wife isn't dead? Suppose the fire...
"Well, next day our little Jean handed me a walloper. Her father's been going to see a plastic surgeon. She thinks it means he’ll alter his appearance after he does a bunk. But that won't do, as I told you. Nobody, not even Ferguson of Edinburgh or Richter of Vienna, can quite manage that. Besides, he'd have to lie up after the operation, and the coppers would get him for certain.
"No, no, no! That’s miles wide of the mark. But what plastic surgery can do, if somebody's been burned..."
Jean sat up straight.
"Then that's why you told me," she said, "that I hadn't given anything away?" "Uh-huh."
"And why," Jean persisted relentlessly, "you said you'd bet Dad would never go near a plastic surgeon, and the police would never have a chance?"
"Sure, my dolly. If it had happened, it would have been all over. But you handed me the real wallop when you turned up in the graveyard tonight, and I was tryin' to keep you from seeing your old man on that grave mound."
"I didn't say anything at all!"
"Ho! Didn't you? You said you'd followed him when he 'went to that place where they trace people.' Trace people! That could only mean a big private firm, say Pursuit, Incorporated, whose record of failure is so small you could balance it on a pin point Suppose Manning had felt his wife wasn't dead? Suppose he'd been tryin', off and on, to trace her? And suppose, some months ago, they found her?"
H.M. shook his head, and gave a sniff of finality.
"That's all," he said apologetically. "It wasn't evidence. It was only supposition. But stab me, I had to try a shot at goal!"
"You made it," replied the present Irene Stanley, with a faint smile. "You were quite right As for what happened... no, please!"
Everybody had started talking at once. Irene Stanley lowered her eyes, from which all trace of tears had been surreptitiously removed. Then she looked up again.
"Please think of me as a stranger!" she begged. "I'm trying to think of you as strangers. We can't be at ease unless we do. Can you see that?"
"I think I can," Crystal murmured, "and from my heart I sympathize."
"When Fred and I were married"—never once did she use the words "your father"—"I was only eighteen. When that explosion occurred, "I was still very young. Perhaps foolish too. The fire, along the whole left side of my face..."
Swiftly she slipped her hand down between a parting in the sofa cushions, brought out a hand mirror, and held it to the right side of her face where the light could fall. She gave a faint gasp of reassurance. Back went the mirror, quickly. That mirror, Cy guessed, was always near.
"I don't mind discussing it," continued the woman, who clearly did mind, "because it was so long ago. One mustn't grow morbid. But, when they dragged me out of the water and I was in the hospital, I made a decision."
Jean cried out "You don't have to tell us..."
"Please, Jean."
"I'm sorry," said Jean, and lowered her head. The woman who was so like Crystal, yet who through years had developed at once a passion and a gentleness beyond Crystal's, hesitated again.
"I thought men value us (and perhaps it's true; I don't know) only for—physical charms. I thought I should be only horror to Fred. I couldn't face him. I couldn't!" Her voice went high, but she controlled it. "So I did what other women have done before me. I let it be known I was drowned."