“I didn’t never think,” he said. “Wheeler’d left, then, so I drove the big car down to the station to meet Mr. Solway, and when I brung him home, you was there. Old Lady Jones tried to tip me off. I saw her trying to tell me something behind your back. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I knew there was something queer. I thought you was a detective Ives’d sent to see what was going on, ’cause he’d been saying he’d do that. I didn’t know, then— But next day Jones told me that—that Ives had—died. Said he’d fell down dead from a heart attack. And she said we’d got to get rid of him on the Q. T., for Amy’s sake. I—I thought I couldn’t—but I did. Fella I know lent me his Ford. I said I wanted to take a girl out. And, while you were out there on the lawn, I—I got him—out of Jones’s room.” “Do you mean he’d been there all that time?” “I guess so. She told me she been sitting up all night, trying to—to see if she could—do anything for him. But he— Anyway, Jones told me what to do, and I did it. I—you don’t know what it was like—going all that way—alone—with him. And I had to put stones in his pockets.” He looked at Ross with a sort of wonder. “I can’t believe it now!” he cried. “It don’t seem true! I don’t know _why_—only Jones told me that if I didn’t, there’d be a inquest an’ all. And she said everyone’d think that Amy— It would all come out, she said, and Amy and Mr. Solway’d be in the newspapers and all. And she said he was dead, anyway. The pond couldn’t hurt _him_. I—” He came closer to Ross, and laid a hand on his sleeve. “Lissen here!” he said. “D’you think that’s true—that he—just died?” “There’s no use thinking about that—now,” said Ross. XIX Ross could feel sorry enough for Eddy, for his ghastly trip to the pond, for all the dread and misery that lay upon his soul. He was sorry for Ives, although his sufferings were at an end. He pitied Mr. Solway, in his ignorance of all this. He was sorry, in his own way, for Amy. But, above all creatures in this world, he pitied that little child. Eddy told him about her. When Ives had gone to “Day’s End,” he had left the child with the obliging barber in town, and she had been there all that night and the next day, until Mrs. Jones had sent Eddy after her. “She said it would start people talking, if the kid stayed there, and she told me to take her back to the cottage and leave her till she made some plans. But I couldn’t do that. The way I felt last night, I didn’t care. I’d rather have seen the whole thing go to smash than leave the kid alone there all night. That’s why I brung her here. And this morning—I couldn’t stay there—in that house. It kind of gave me the creeps. So I took her back to the barber’s.” He paused. “Jones don’t care about the kid,” he added. “She don’t care about anything on earth but Amy. Lissen here! I know she’s old and all, but I think—maybe she—I just wonder if the old girl had the nerve?”