"Yes. Old-fashioned key--why, I probably never had used it before, no occasion to. But I did then. I threw myself down on the bed. My throat was still raw and sour from vomiting, I remember that." "Now you told Mr. Lamson that there's a stretch of a few minutes, in the bedroom, that won't quite come back. I take it for granted that since then you've been trying to fill in that gap in memory. Suppose I put it this way, Callista: is it possible now for you to add anything to what you told Mr. Lamson that day in his office?" _Not quite a direct lie required--thanks, friend. Not that it matters, direct or indirect. The letter killeth--inner Puritan, drop dead, drop dead!_ "No, Mr. Warner--as you say, I've tried ever since to clear up that part in my mind, but--I can't add anything now." _I don't dare look toward a certain flinty intelligent face--the name is Francis Fielding--and yet I'll do it._ He was very quiet, Mr. Fielding, alert, interested; no change or wavering in his smart bird-like eyes as she met their probing and tried briefly, unavailingly, to win a glimpse of the self behind them. _Once I watched a heron in my famous field glasses, motionless at the edge of a stream. Motionless, hunting motionless._ That had been only the summer before last, a trip alone in the Volks to the hill country. More of the day came back, a good day and the summer hush. Eighteen. The heron had remained a somber painted image until the frog returned to the bank; then he got his meal: too large a frog to swallow whole, so he knocked it to pieces against a rock and resumed his stillness. But Cecil was speaking. "I'll make a suggestion, Callista--a sort of hypothetical question, though I won't try to phrase it in precisely that form. Before you broke away and went into your bedroom you'd been, as you say, hysterical, sick, nauseated: too early for ordinary morning sickness I suppose, but the pregnancy must have had at least some influence on your condition. And you had undergone, were still undergoing, an intense emotional strain: the anticipation, the build-up to your interview with Mrs. Doherty, then sudden realization that it was wasted effort. Now I suggest that all those things coming together at once might have produced a plain old-fashioned fainting spell, a blackout from exhaustion. And I'll ask: is everything you remember about those moments consistent with that? It makes sense to you, that this could be what happened?"