Her father had been old-fashioned enough to think any kind of an affair a degradation, the equivalent of harlotry undisguised, a living in sin which he could not have forgiven. He'd been a kindly, charitable man, but not without a terrible, inward struggle which would have seared his soul. "That a daughter of mine--" She glanced at her wrist-watch, and saw that she was still quite early--barely twenty minutes to nine. If she ascended to the street again quickly none of the Eaton-Lathrup office staff would be likely to see her emerging from the excavation, breathless and with a complete lack of dignity, her skirt swirling up above her knees. She opened her hand-bag, dropped in the locket and snapped the bag shut, tightening her lips a little as her father's handsome, but sad-eyed, rather melancholy face flashed again before her inward vision. She was quite sure she _didn't_ have a father-complex, but the thought of bringing any kind of pain to him-- Oh, damn such thoughts--damn such modern jargon silliness. You'd think people today spent nine-tenths of their lives on psychiatric couches. Perhaps they did--or that's what the head shrinkers wanted everyone to believe. She liked that word--head shrinkers. It put them in their place. A cult, that's what it was. Sweeping the country and poor old Freud himself had known poverty and heartbreak and if he could have gotten twenty dollars an hour he might have been able to smoke better cigars, at least, and taken more rides through the beautiful streets of old Vienna and have gotten in his personal life a few of the compensations genius was entitled to as a young man. How was he to know his theories would make perhaps a billion dollars for practitioners he'd never set eyes on in a far-off land? She had turned and was just starting back up the slope when she saw the big flat stone. What is there about that kind of stone which fascinates almost everyone, which few people can resist overturning to see what lies beneath? Young school-boys do it all the time--young naturalists in search of beetles and centipedes and all kinds of damp, hueless crawling insects. And adults do it for a dozen reasons, often for the same reason, or to see if there's any grass growing underneath, in a region of barren, tumbled earth, or if it's covering a diamond necklace someone dropped weeks before--just as Ruth Porges had dropped the locket, but had given up more easily than she had done. Or just for the sheer pleasure of overturning a big flat stone, covering dampness, covering mold. The stone was about forty feet from the base of the crane and almost directly in the path of a sturdy-looking steam shovel with a large enough scoop to lift it up and deposit it in a heap of tumbled earth into which it would sink, and be carted away and dumped elsewhere, along with the tons of earth which had already been scooped out of the pit.