In his tone, and a shifting of his eyes to the next table, I caught a suggestion of something not easy, put on. Maybe if you hadn’t known what I did you wouldn’t have noticed what was plain to me—he didn’t like the subject. "No, I never touch wine," I answered. "I don’t want to speak unfeelingly but it was mighty convenient your uncle died just as your business failed. Wasn’t it too bad about Miss Whitehall?" "Very unfortunate, poor girl. Bad for me but worse for her." "She had no idea it was coming, I suppose?" He looked up sudden and sharp: "_What_ was coming?" His small gray eyes sent a glance piercing into mine, full of a quick, arrested attention. "Why—why—the ruin of Mr. Harland." "Oh, _that_," he was easy again, "I thought you meant the suicide. I don’t know whether she knew or not. Waiter"—he turned and made one of those grandstand plays to the waiter—"take this away and bring on the next." "She’d have known that night as soon as she heard he was dead but I guess she was so paralyzed she didn’t think of herself." "I don’t know what she thought of. She wasn’t in the office." I dropped my eyes to my plate. Eliza crossing on the ice didn’t have anything over me in the way she picked her steps. "Oh, she’d gone before it happened?" "Yes. I left early myself that night—before she did. I was halfway home when I remembered some papers I’d said I’d go over and had to hike back for them. She was gone when I got there. And just think how gruesome it was, when I was going down in the elevator Harland jumped, struck the street a few minutes before I reached the bottom." Could you beat it! Knowing what had been done in that closed office, knowing what was going to be done while he was sliding down from story to story and then getting it off that way, as smooth as cream. A sick feeling rose up inside me. I wanted to get away from him and see an honest face and feel the cold, fresh air. Dining with a gunman wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. Tony Ford, leaning across his plate, tapped on the cloth with his knife handle to emphasize his words: "He must have been up that side corridor waiting. When he heard the gate shut and the car go down, he came out, walked to the hall window and jumped. Ugh!" he gave a wriggling movement with his broad shoulders. "_That_ takes nerve!" I suppose sometimes in crowds you pass murderers, but you don’t know them for what they are. Probably never again if I lived to be a hundred, would I sit this way, not only conversing with one, but conversing about his crime. It wasn’t what you’d look back on afterward as one of the happy memories of your life, but it was a red-letter experience. I had a vision of telling my grandchildren how once, when I was young, I talked with one of the blackest criminals of his day on the subject of the deed he’d helped commit.