"Very well," I told her. "Will you arrange to have me see Colonel McIntosh tomorrow morning? Tell--" here I took a leap--"Tell him that I'm from the White House." "You aren't, are you?" "Of course not, but I gather that's the kind of bait your Colonel needs." "He's a very clever man," Dorothy belatedly defended him. "They say he did brilliant staff-intelligence work under Stillwell in the first Burma campaign." "That's the one we lost, isn't it?" I asked dryly. "No, Dorothy. Let me see this Colonel. You know how to fix it--there's always one special girl in an office that has the ear of a man like that. Frank swore to me that there was nothing you couldn't do if you decided it was worth while." She looked at me across the little round, black table. "Mr. Tompkins," she said, "I have no way of telling whether you are telling the truth or not. Frankly, if General Donovan was in town I wouldn't bother him, but Colonel McIntosh is--you know--one of _the_ Chicago McIntoshes. You never heard of him? Nobody else did either but here he is with a British accent and if you can make the grade with him it won't worry me." I ordered another round of drinks. "Tell me, Dorothy," I said, "not that it's any of my business, except that I was a friend of your husband's, don't you feel any special regret that he's probably gone west?" She took a man-sized swallow of her old-fashioned. "Not particularly," she admitted. "In a general, normal sort of way, I'm sorry, of course. He was nice even if we didn't get on very well. But we had almost no interests in common and when we broke up it was for keeps. He was kind, and on the whole, decent, but God! so stuffy and boring to live with. Day after day, Hartford, Connecticut, writing and yessing, living by minutes and dying by inches. He rather liked it. I couldn't understand it. So you can see why I can't pretend to be prostrated. And perhaps he isn't dead at all." I nodded. "He's dead if that's the way you feel about him," I said. "He told me that his wife was a lovely girl with a mole on her hip and the hell of a temper. He said it was like being married to a circus acrobat or an opera singer--exciting but not happy. He said you had a habit of--" I stopped in the nick of time. "Oh, he did, did he?" she snapped. "Well, Mr. Tompkins, I don't suppose he ever told you that he snored or that--" "Skip it, please," I calmed her. "It's your marriage, not mine. I told you these things so you'd know I was really sent to you by Frank. Now you fix it so I can talk to McIntosh." "I will," she replied.