She lifted her eyes. Her lashes pulled against the mesh of her veil and again lent her her look of astonishment. She said distantly: “My son loved Eva, and his life is probably spoiled. He has ideas in his head which only time can eradicate. I am convinced that he never said a cross word to her. But, as you know, I myself had several conversations with my daughter-in-law which in the light of her death I regret. You will be doing me a favour if you tell your friends that I--and not my son--undoubtedly upset her. And, Mrs. Avery, you will kindly refrain from repeating to my son, if you should see him, what his wife said in your presence about his work.” With superb dismissal of me from her life, she put up her _lorgnette_ and inspected me. Her eyes swept over me, remotely speculative. With the slightest of nods, she turned away. The ship had docked. She clung to the barrier with both hands. Her white kid gloves, pinching her hands, must have supplied the physical pain she now welcomed. For she lifted to the deck, where she would see her son, a face from which she had erased all that would distress him. [Illustration] II Nicholas Van Suydam stood at my door, unannounced. He had not telephoned to ask if he might come, and this he at once explained by the flat statement that he had realized I would not wish to see him. With between us the memory of our last meeting, we stood mutually embarrassed. I wondered how he was going to set about saying what he must have determined to say when he took the step of coming to see me. He set about it with commendable speed. “My mother appears to think that you consider me guilty of something dastardly. I’m not sure that, in her heart, she doesn’t agree with you.” I watched him narrowly, perplexed as to how much she had repeated of our talk on the docks: had she, for instance, told him that she had witnessed the scene which had so shaken her at the time and which had shaken me when she repeated it to me? Cautiously I suggested that these things were no business of mine. He looked me in the eye. “Eva told me she had written you that she had made up her mind to leave me.” I sighed: “It was unnecessary to inform you that I knew--as things turned out.” He said harshly: “I came here to tell you that she was about to leave me.” It was now his turn to sigh deeply; but his indrawn breath was expelled as if it were his curse on his fate. “The suddenness of it,” he resumed, “would have shocked any man, even one who understood Eva.” I asked if he had ever felt that he understood Eva. “I understood her.” Without glancing at him, I knew that he watched me. “She killed something in me. It’s resurrected every now and then; but it’s a ghost. Oh--I understood her!”