THE CLOSED DOOR By John Fleming Wilson “I left the wreck in the last boat,” Gorham told me. “It was a very dark and stormy morning and the sea ran before the gale in great splashes of a kind of vivid, intense white. To the east of us the California coast rose like a shadow out of the spume and spindrift. And that woman sat beside me on the thwart and clutched my arm with a steady, relentless strength which affected me more than if she had screamed.” “I never could understand that affair,” I said. “Harry Owen was not only a seaman of ability and experience, but the last man in the world to----” Gorham sighed and lifted his tired eyes to mine. “I have never appeared in the affair, of course,” he remarked. “I was only a passenger on the _Shearwater_. The underwriters didn’t go into the matter.” My companion sighed again, staring at me owlishly. He rubbed his great forearm thoughtfully. “That woman’s fingers were set in my flesh, I tell you, right through my jacket. And it was precisely as if she were screaming. And any minute I expected a sea to tumble us all into Davy Jones’ locker.” “His wife?” I commented. “Of course,” Gorham replied. “So she was--Captain Harry Owen’s wife. And although she had been married to him six years she had never so much as suspected, I think.” “Suspected what?” Gorham made a slight gesture of disdain for my dullness. “Who the other woman was.” It was my turn to stare. Hadn’t I known Owen for years, been shipmate with him, been his friend? And didn’t everybody know that after he married pretty Sheila McTodd he never so much as glanced at another woman? “You mean to tell me that there was another woman?” I demanded of Gorham. Then something in the extraordinary expression of his usually calm face stopped me. “Then that explains----” “Why the _Shearwater_ was, in a way, deliberately cast away,” he finished. “Did you know the other woman?” I asked. He nodded. “Did I know her?” I insisted. Gorham whispered a name and we looked at each other intently, each waiting for the other to speak. “It is incredible!” I said finally, and I walked to the window and stared out into the rain that was lashing San Francisco. Then I turned on him fiercely. “You don’t know what you are saying! I tell you Harry Owen, to my certain knowledge, never so much as went to tea with Kitty Melrose after he married Sheila. And of all women to accuse of being--of being--” I shook my fist at Gorham. He did not move. “I _know_!” he said quietly. “I tell you I was there. She was the first woman I saw when our boat finally reached the _Western Pacific_ and we were literally dragged on board out of the boiling sea. The instant I caught her eyes, I knew. She was standing in a sheltered corner of the deckhouse, her dark hair set with pearls of spray and her lips parted in a sort of childlike amazement. It was exactly as if I had been working over a puzzle for years and suddenly the missing bit popped up and completed it, solved it.”