"Oh, every now and then some report went round in Boston that So-and-so had seen you in this hotel or that; but nothing of the sort has been said for a year or two, and we thought that it was just the kind of fake story that gets about. But now! Well, I must break the news to Vio—" "Why shouldn’t I break it myself? I could call her up by long distance." "Man, if she heard your voice like that it would kill her. You don’t _know_. No, I must go; there’s no help for it, headache or no headache. Mildred dear, won’t you call Annette? I told her she could go to the theater to-night, but now she’ll have to get our tickets, and pack!" She wrung her hands. "Oh, dear! When a man’s dead, he’d better stay dead!" Mildred slipped from the room. A suspicion began to creep over me. "Is there any special reason for my staying dead?" "How _can_ you when you’re alive? That’s the important point. Vio will never forgive you for being alive—and not telling her." "She will when she’s heard." "She’s got to hear right away, and I’m going to take charge of it. You may say it’s none of my business, but I’m making it mine. I’ve known Vio Torrance since we were tots together." I ventured to remind her that Vio might be her friend, but that she was my wife. "Wife!" she crowed, scornfully. "Have you treated her like a wife—to be alive all this time and never let her know! When I tell you that she’s been in mourning for you and out again—positively out again— Well, you can imagine!" "I can imagine so many things—" But she jerked her little person away from me toward the two fellows who were trying dully to follow the scene they were witnessing without being able to seize its drift. "Take all this stuff back again to where you brought it from. I’m not going to buy any of it. The idea of Billy Harrowby—" She repeated the name with a squeal, "Billy _Harrowby!_ of all people in the world! Why, it’s enough to drive me out of my senses. I suppose you don’t know," she continued, switching back to me again, "that they’ve put a new man in your place at the Museum, over a year ago, a Frenchman; and that Vio has given them all your prints and etchings for a William Harrowby Memorial—that’s what she called it—she had to do something of the sort after your tragic end, in common decency; and you considered a hero, something like Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger, and now what’s it to be—and you alive?" A dramatic gesture seemed to claim this confusion as something for which Fate had made her specially responsible. "Lulu, take me away, for Heaven’s sake! I shall never look at a Chinese rug again without thinking—" When the two ladies, with arms around each other’s waist, had passed into the hallway, and out of sight, I turned to my colleagues, saying merely: "I think we’d better roll these up and beat it." Neither made any comment till we were in the lorry on our way back to Creed & Creed’s, when one of them said in an awe-stricken tone: