She must have been very sure of the nature of my preoccupation; she said: “It’s dreadful--and good--to be so old that one knows when things are impossible.” The sun had broken through the fog, but she looked as if she felt that the shadows of the pier were shadows waiting to engulf her and her son. She stood shivering. And yet, with Higginson, she obeyed her own command: “Drive on!” She turned her head, with that creaking turn of the aged, and looked me full in the eye. “Mrs. Avery, you know so much about the intimate personal affairs of my son and his late wife--” and her old distaste was on her face, and in her sharpened voice--“that I must ask you: have you the slightest idea what took place between them at the last?” I replied, truthfully and with some wonder, that I did not. I explained that I had been out of town when Eva returned from Hollywood, and that before she set out for New York she had written me but one letter. I said nothing of the contents of the letter. Looking squarely at her in my determination that she should give me an answer, I asked: “Mrs. Van Suydam, how did Eva really die?” She had turned more fully towards me, and as I spoke I saw her hand thrust behind to again grasp the rail of the barrier. A tremor started at her head and ran down through her body. She said simply that Eva had died of pneumonia, brought on, she believed, by exposure on the train from California to the East. But we had arrived at a state of tension wherein I almost heard her call out to her God: “I’ve never known all!” From the fact that again her dreadful, steady trembling took possession of her I felt sure that part of what had happened had taken place before her eyes, and that she had been daunted by it. In those quiet hours of the night when old people sleep lightly, she would forever after awaken to the same horror that had fallen upon her then. She glared at me, but it was an appeal. She gave the impression of wildly desiring to clutch some human being and hold on, and of a complete aversion to physically touching me because I had received her intimate revelations. But she said, directly to whatever I might oppose: “It was undoubtedly pneumonia. It could have been nothing else. The doctor diagnosed it as pneumonia. The way she breathed----” “I meant,” I said softly, “her other death.” She looked away. I saw that she took a long breath. When she again turned her eyes were under control. She said at once, then: “I beg you to believe me when I say that I know no more than you. What I may surmise, and what you may suspect, are probably different. But I shouldn’t be doing my duty to my son if I let you go away without plain speaking on my part. My son has told me nothing. So far as I know, he never had an approach to a quarrel with Eva.” “Her friends,” I said slowly, “have wondered. You can’t be surprised at that.”