"I have just learned," informed Doyle, "that Wilford had been having her shadowed. They tell me, too, that she has been seen once or twice with an old friend of hers, Vance Shattuck, the broker. They tell me that before she married Wilford she was once engaged to Shattuck. Know him?" he asked, turning to me.
"I've heard of him," I replied. "I guess he's well known on Wall Street—seems to get his name into the papers often enough, anyhow, in one scandal or another."
"Well, I think that dream stuff is all camouflage, just between you and me," nodded Doyle, sagely, drawing a piece of paper from his pocket. "I've been going over things pretty carefully since I've been here. In her desk I found this thing."
He held out the paper to Kennedy. It was a page torn out of a book of poetry, an anthology, I imagined, for on the page was printed the title of a sonnet, "Renouncement," and the name of the author, Alice Meynell. On the wide margin of the page was written in ink, in what Doyle assured us was Mrs. Wilford's own handwriting, the notation, "One of the greatest sonnets of pure emotion."
We all read it and I am forced to admit that, whatever our opinion might have been of Honora Wilford before, we were convinced that her literary judgment was not at fault. I add the sonnet:
I must not think of thee; and tired, yet strong,
I shun the love that lurks in all delight—
The love of thee—and in the blue heaven's height
And in the dearest passage of a song.
Oh, just beyond the sweetest thoughts that throng