somehow Charlie suspected something queer
and insisted, in one of his obstinate fits, on his duty to call.

"I know this because they stood for a long time under the trees in front
of our house, Charles's voice booming up through the scented darkness as
he argued. Emily put him off with various feminine subterfuges--she was,
I remember, rather magnificent in her despairing diplomacy--and I
thought for a while she would succeed. Then I heard Brede's voice,
wrathful and sullen, with a quality of finality.

"'If you are ashamed of me----' he said, and walked off.

"It was the one statement she could not outwit. Emily stood for a
moment, then--I can imagine with what terrific surrender of pride--ran
after him.

"'Charlie, Charlie!' she called. He stopped. She came up to him. There
was a low murmur of voices, and I thought she was crying.

"'Tuesday, then,' he said, and kissed her.

"Emily waited until he was well away, and in the moonlight I could see
her raise her hands to her head in a gesture that might have been
despair, that might have been puzzlement. Then she crossed the street
into the blackness of their porch.

"Did she love him? I don't know. Do you?"

The question hung motionless in the air. Fawcett lit another cigar.

"One would have expected something regal about the man Emily Drainger
should choose. You agree with me, I suspect, that she is--or
was--leonine, terrific. Perhaps she was deceived by his face. Perhaps,
after the manner of lovers, she found splendid lights and vistas in the
Charlie Brede the rest of us considered rather ordinary. Or perhaps,
since she had lived her solitary life so long, pestered and haunted by
her mother, any pair of lips would have awakened in her the same
powerful and primitive impulses. He was her man, and she wanted him, and
she was not to get him. I have even thought that she did not love him
at all: that she was quite willing to feign a passion in order to escape
from that terrible mother with her eyes forever focused on her tragedy,
her mother, and that gaunt, grim house. I am superstitious about that
house. Nothing good can come out of it. It warped Mrs. Drainger out of
all semblance to human nature, and it was warping Emily, and Mrs.
Drainger was somehow the presiding genius, the central heart of that
sinister fascination.

"Charlie called that Tuesday night, I know, because I stayed home to
see. I was quite unashamed in doing so. He had, I must say, courage. Bu