Mimika shrank behind her brother and both stood motionless, waiting. They could hear the heavy breathing of Vandermeer, the breathing of a man roused from a dyspeptic sleep. He came down with an intolerable precision, making the twelve steps of that short descent seem almost interminable. At every step Mimika felt the edges of her heart freezing. At last that ugly rhythm reached the foot of the stairs; and with three more shuffling steps, as of a gigantic ape, the hairy bulk of Vandermeer stood in the doorway, facing them across the glittering mound of gems. The sharp searchlight of the moon made his face corpselike, showing up the puffy blue pouches under his eyes and picking out the coarse red hairs of his bushy beard like strands of copper wire. His eyes protruded, his mouth opened twice without any sound but the soft smacking of his tongue as he tried to moisten his lips.
"What are you doing here?" he said at last.
"Looking at your Landsturm," said Roy with all the deadly calm of his nation.
Vandermeer swayed a little on his feet, like a drunken man. Then he moved forward to the table and blinked at the diamonds and the gold ring crowning them.
"I don't understand," he said at last.
"You'd better get dressed, Mimika," said Roy. "Our train goes at a quarter after four." He led her to the door, watched her pathetic little figure mounting the stairs and turned to Vandermeer again.
Mimika never knew what passed between the two men. When she came out of her room, ten minutes later, Roy was waiting, fully dressed, at the foot of the stairs, with his suit case in his hand. She heard the heavy breathing of Vandermeer in his den; and out of the corner of her eye as they passed the door she saw that glowing mass on the table, as if a fragment of the moon had been dropped there.
They walked down the long avenue of palms in silence. In the waiting-room at the station neither of them spoke till they heard the long hoot of the approaching train, and the clangor of the bell on the transcontinental locomotive.
Six months later Mimika and her mother were sitting up for Roy, in their fourth-floor flat near the offices of the Copley-Willard Publishing Company, in Philadelphia.
"I wish he didn't have to keep these late hours," said her mother. "I thought that everything was turning out for the best when you were married to Julius. I have never been able to understand why you got your divorce so quickly. It was all kept so quiet, and you and Roy are so mysterious about it. You've never even told me the real grounds, I'm sure."