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with its every flutter. It looked so blithe. Horribly, incongruously blithe. It seemed to sav, "I belong to life and light and laughter, I wreathe the golden hair of pretty girls in the evening." And yet it was there, nailed to the portal, so that passersby might know that within was a man who hadn't cared to live any longer . . .

Why?

His knock was answered by a gaunt gray woman who said, "Yes?"

"I—I just came—" he stammered. The sight of this stranger confused him oddly. Somehow he had expected Eunice to meet him at the door, as she always did. He had felt all along that this was his tragedy, not Eunice's . . . idiotic of him . . .

"I'm a friend of his," he explained to the gaunt gray woman. "Jock Hamill."

She let him in then. "Oh, yes—Mrs. Hathaway said if you should come she wanted to see you."

He waited in the living room. Not sitting down. Pacing about, almost on tiptoe, so that he should make no noise. He had to keep moving. When you sat down you saw too many things that stabbed you. The place where Brad had sat the night before. His beloved pipe lying on its side in a glass ash tray. His hat, his battered brown hat, just where he had taken it off. . . . When you walked you did not see these things so clearly.

The house was very still. Footsteps and murmuring voices came from the back somewhere, but they seemed stiller than the silence. Once a solemn-faced man passed the door . . . professionally solemn, paid to