Suddenly she smiled and yielded to the pressure of his arm. "It must be the MacKnight in me--my Scotch ancestry," she said laughing. "Awfully stubborn, you know. Monomaniacs. When we're crazy on a thing, we're completely crazy, but when we drop it, we drop it all at once. Like my great-uncle Peter. You know, the one who left the Presbyterian ministry and gave up Christianity on the very same day he proved to his satisfaction there was no God. He was seventy-two at the time." There was a long and grumbling roll of thunder. The storm was swinging back. "Well, I'm very glad you're only worried about me," she continued. "It's complimentary, and I like it." She was smiling happily, but there was still something enigmatic about the eyes, something withheld. As he was congratulating himself on carrying it off successfully, it suddenly occurred to him that two could play at the game of lying. She might be holding something back herself, with the idea of reassuring him. She might be trying to protect him from her own blacker worries. Her subtlety might undercut his own. No sane reason to suspect that, and yet-- "Suppose I get us a drink," she said, "and we decide whether or not you leave Hempnell this year, and look for greener fields." He nodded. She started around the bend in the L-shaped room for the sideboard. "--and yet, you could live with a person and love a person for fifteen years, and not know what was behind their eyes." * * * * * There was the rattle of glassware, and the friendly sound of a full bottle set down on a table. Then, timed to the thunder, but much, much closer, a shuddering, animal scream of anguished fear. It was cut off before Norman had sprung to his feet. As he cleared the angle of the room, he saw Tansy going through the kitchen door. She was a little ahead of him down the back steps. Light fanned out from the windows of the opposite house into the service yard. It revealed the sprawled body of Totem, head mashed flat against the concrete. He heard a little sound start and stop in Tansy's throat. It might have been a gasp, or a sob, or a snarl. The light revealed a little more than the body. He moved so that his feet covered the two prominent scuffs in the concrete just beyond the body. They might have been caused by the impact of a brick or heavy stone, perhaps the thing that had killed Totem, but there was something so suggestive about their relative position that he did not want Tansy's imagination to have a chance to work on them. She lifted her face. She was never one to show much emotion. "You'd better go in," he said. "You'll--" He nodded. "Yes." She stopped halfway up the stairs. "That was a rotten, rotten thing for anybody to do." "Yes. We'll try to find out who." She left the door open. A moment later she came out and laid on the porch railing a square of heavy cloth, covered with shed hair. Then she went in again and shut the door.