"I always was a procrastinator," he said. "Come into my study, won't you?"
Still holding me by the hand he led me like a child into the room out of which he had shot—an adorable room, with a beamed ceiling and diamond-paned windows looking under trees to the river. In front of his desk—where he could glance up for inspiration as he wrote—was a life-sized portrait of June, by Sargent; June in the gray dress and hat she had worn the day she promised—no, offered—to marry Robert.
"You see!" he said, with a slight gesture toward the picture, with its bunched red-bronze hair and brilliant eyes of blue, "this is where I sit and work."
"And where used Joyce Arnold to sit and work?" something in me blurted out.
The man winced—just visibly—no more. His eyes flashed to mine a kind of challenge. There was sudden anger in it, and pleading as well. Then, of course, I knew—all I had come to find out. And he must have known that I knew!
But I'd come for a great deal more than finding out.
I don't think I'm a coward, yet I was dreadfully frightened—in a blue funk of doing or saying the wrong thing at a moment when it might be "now or never." My knees felt like badly poached eggs with no toast to repose upon. I lost my head a little, and what I did I didn't do really, because it did itself.
I looked as scared as I felt, and gasped: "Oh, Robert!" (I'd never called him "Robert" to his face before; only behind his back.)
My face of fright deflected his rage. You can't be furious with a quivering jelly! But he didn't speak. The challenge in his eyes softened to reproach. Then he looked at the portrait.
"Miss Arnold sat where she, too, could see June," he answered quietly.