Lieutenant Valcour wondered concerning Mrs. Endicott as he walked slowly across the corridor and knocked on the door of her room. A curious, curious woman, with youth and beauty that almost passed belief. He knew her instinctively as one of life’s misfits: complex to a note far beyond the common tune; essentially an individualist; essentially unhappy from an inevitable loneliness which is the lot of all who are banished within the narrow confines of their own complexity; a type he had seldom met, but of whose existence he was well aware.

Roberts opened the door. The woman’s face was butchered and her eyes had the quality of glass.

“Ask Mrs. Endicott, please, whether she feels strong enough to see me for a moment.”

Mrs. Endicott’s voice was definitely metallic. As it reached him in the corridor, disembodied from any visual association with herself, it seemed to hold a muted echo of brass bells.

“Certainly, come in. I wish, Lieutenant, you would give up the tiresome fiction that I am going to collapse. I’ll ring, Roberts, when I want you.”

“Yes, madam.”

As Roberts passed him on her way to the door Lieutenant Valcour felt an imperative awareness of an attempt at revelations⁠—an attempt to impart to him some special knowledge. Her eyes, as she glanced at him, lost their cobwebs and grew sharply informative. It was entirely an unconscious reaction on his part that forced from his lips the word “Later.” The cobwebs reappeared. She left the room.

Lieutenant Valcour drew a chair close to the chaise longue upon which Mrs. Endicott was nervously lying. Flung across her knees was a robe of China silk, a black river bearing on its surface huge flowers done in silver and slashed at its fringes with the jade chiffon of her dress. He launched his campaign by first swinging, wordily, well wide of its ultimate objective. His tone, from a deliberate casual friendliness, was an anodyne to possible reservations, or fears.

“It is the tragedy of a detective’s life,” he said pleasantly, “that the sudden slender contact he has with a case affords such a useless background for human behaviour. You can see what I mean, Mrs. Endicott. Were I you, or some intimate friend either of yourself or of your husband, I would already be in possession of the countless little threads that have woven the pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life for the past five or ten years. You’ll forgive me for outraging oratory? It’s a nasty habit I’ve contracted in later years whenever dealing with the abstract. I’m not making a speech, really. What I’m trying to express is that in that background, that pattern of Mr. Endicott’s life, one thread or series of interrelated threads would stand out pretty plainly as the reason why someone should wish to kill him.”

“I,” said Mrs. Endicott, “have several times wished to kill him.”

Lieutenant Valcour nodded. “There is nothing left for me but the trite things to say about marriage. And trite things, after all, are the true things, don’t you think?”

“If they’re just discovered. I mean by that, that to the person just discovering their deadly aptness they’re true. Rather terribly so sometimes.”

“But the aptness wears off with usage?”

Mrs. Endicott’s slender hand and arm were models of quietness in motion as she reached for a cigarette. “Everything wears off with usage,” she said. “Love quicker than anything else.”

“But it doesn’t wear off completely, love doesn’t, ever.”

Mrs. Endicott looked at him sharply. “Why are you a detective?” she said.

“The accident of birth⁠—of environment. Only geniuses, you know, ever quite escape those two fatalities. My parents emigrated from France to Canada, where my father held a certain reputation in my present profession. My parents died. There was enough money to secure an education at McGill⁠—one had contacts here in the States⁠ ⁠…” Lieutenant Valcour smiled infectiously. “I reversed Caesar in that I came, was seen, was conquered.”

Mrs. Endicott was amused. “How utterly conceited.”

“Isn’t it?”

The smile vanished from her face with the peculiar suddenness of some conjuring trick. She veered abruptly. “What are they doing in my husband’s room now?” she said.

“Dr. Worth and the medical examiner are determining the cause of death.” Lieutenant Valcour transferred his attention to a Sargent watercolour above the mantel. “Dr. Worth has already expressed the opinion that it was heart failure,” he said.

Mrs. Endicott offered no immediate comment. She withdrew, for a moment, into some private chamber, and her voice was rather expressionless when she spoke. “But that isn’t murder.”

“It could be⁠—if the disease itself were used as a weapon.”

“I don’t believe that I understand.”

“Why, if some person who knew that Mr. Endicott was subject to heart attacks were deliberately to shock or scare him suddenly, or even give him a not especially forceful blow over the heart, and he were to die as a result of any one of those things, that would be murder. It would have to be proved pretty conclusively, of course, that it had been done deliberately.”

Mrs. Endicott joined him in his continued inspection of the Sargent. “It would indicate a rather circumscribed field for suspects, too, don’t you think?”

“Yes. One would confine one’s suspicions to those who were intimate enough with him to know of his physical condition. But apart from all that phase, there are those things we technically speak of as ‘attendant circumstances.’ They point to murder.”

Their glances brushed for a second in passing and then parted.

“Such as?”

Lieutenant Valcour explained, with certain reservations. “The note you showed me⁠—the position of Mr. Endicott in the cupboard⁠—the fact that he is completely dressed for out of doors, but there is no trace of his hat⁠—oh, several little things that speak quite plainly.” He focused her directly. “Where did Mr. Endicott usually keep his hats?”

“I’ve never noticed particularly. There’s a cupboard downstairs in the entrance hall, and of course the one⁠—”

“Yes, I’ve looked for it up here. I wonder whether you’d care to tell me what happened⁠—what you did, I mean, and what you remember of Mr. Endicott’s movements from the time, say, of his reaching home this afternoon.”

Mrs. Endicott’s face sought refuge in the very pith of candour. “Why, nothing much⁠—nothing unusual.”

Lieutenant Valcour laughed pleasantly. “That is where I fail in my background,” he said. “The things done were usual to both of you and therefore of no importance. To me, however, they would prove interesting because of their unfamiliarity. Did you talk at all?”

“Elaborately.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I said elaborately. Herbert makes a point of talking elaborately whenever he’s lying.”

“I see⁠—he was lying, then, about Marge Myles.”

“And unoriginally. But Herbert never was original, much, in his emotions. He told me he was going to an impromptu reunion of some men in his class at the Yale Club. These reunions have occurred with astonishing regularity once a week for the past month, in spite of their impromptu character. I detest having my intelligence insulted,” she ended, not unfiercely, “more than anything else in the world.”

“You will forgive me for becoming personal, but I doubt whether Mr. Endicott understood you very well.”

“He didn’t understand me at all.”

“And you, him?”

Mrs. Endicott momentarily disarranged the perfect arch of her eyebrows. “I could see through him perfectly,” she said. “A child could see through him. But understand him? I don’t think anyone could understand Herbert. He made a fetish of reticence. He was,” she concluded, “half animal.”

“And the other half rather cloudily complex?”

“A fog.”

“And when he came home this afternoon at five?”

“Five-thirty⁠—nearer six, even.”

“Toward six, he joined you in the living room and gave you the weekly excuse.”

“I didn’t say the living room. It was the top floor⁠—you may have noticed that this house has a peaked roof⁠—in what would correspond in the country to an attic⁠—” She stopped sharply, and her defensive veneer cracked for an instant, long enough to show that she was definitely startled. “I⁠—”

“You feel that you shouldn’t have told me that. Perhaps you shouldn’t. If the fact of your having met Mr. Endicott in the attic has nothing to do with the case at all, it will cause us to snoop around among your personal affairs unnecessarily.”

“He didn’t ‘meet’ me there, as you say. He⁠—I don’t know why he came up there. I never will know why.”

“You didn’t ask him?”

Mrs. Endicott forced Lieutenant Valcour’s full attention by the almost startling intentness of her eyes. “There has never been a direct question put or answered between Herbert and me during the whole period of our married or unmarried life,” she said. “My hold on him was the static perfection of my features and a running, superficial smartness in attitude and mind that passed for intellect. His hold on me was that I loved him.”

“Even when you wished to kill him?”

“I suppose even then. Mind you, I never wished him dead⁠—there’s a difference.”

“Oh, quite.” Lieutenant Valcour smiled engagingly. “You often felt like killing him, but you wanted it to stop right there.”

“You know, I wish you’d come to tea sometime⁠—” Mrs. Endicott’s eyes contracted sharply. Her voice became a definite apology, not to Lieutenant Valcour, but as though its message were being sent along obscure and private channels to some port where it would find her husband. “There are moments,” she said, “when you make me forget.”

“Forgetting isn’t a sin. That’s natural. It’s not loving⁠—being mentally hurtful⁠—that’s a sin. There isn’t any word exactly for what I mean. Did you both stay in the attic and go through the trunk together, or whatever it was you were going through?”

Mrs. Endicott smiled as if at some secret knowledge. “I wasn’t going through a trunk,” she said.

“No? I just mentioned it, as nine times out of ten that’s what people do in attics.”

“And the tenth customary thing,” said Mrs. Endicott, reaching for a cigarette, “is suicide.”