“I’m going east to-night,” he quite casually announced. “But above all things I want you and your Dinky-Dunk to hang on here as long as you can. He needs it. I’m stepping out. No, I don’t mean that, exactly, for I’d never stepped in. But it’s a fine thing, in this world, for men and women to be real friends. And I know, until we shuffle off, that we’re going to be that!”
“Peter!” I cried again, trying not to choke up with the sudden sense of deprivation that was battering my heart to pieces. And the light in faithful old Peter’s eyes didn’t make it any easier.
But he dropped my hand, of a sudden, and went stumbling rather awkwardly over the Spanish tiling as he passed out to the waiting car. I watched him as he climbed into it, stiffly yet with a show of careless bravado, for all the world like the lean-jowled knight of the vanished fête mounting his bony old Rosinante.
It was nearly half an hour later that Dinky-Dunk came into the cool-shadowed living-room where I was making a pretense of being busy at cutting down some of Dinkie’s rompers for Pee-Wee, who most assuredly must soon bid farewell to skirts.
“Will you sit down, please?” he said with an abstracted sort of formality. For he’d caught me on the wing, half-way back from the open window, where I’d been glancing out to make sure Struthers was on guard with the children.
My face was a question, I suppose, even when I didn’t speak.
“There’s something I want you to be very quiet and courageous about,” was my husband’s none too tranquillizing beginning. And I could feel my pulse quicken.
“What is it?” I asked, wondering just what women should do to make themselves quiet and courageous.
“It’s about Allie,” answered my husband, speaking so slowly and deliberately that it sounded unnatural. “She shot herself last night. She—she killed herself, with an army revolver she’d borrowed from a young officer down there.”
I couldn’t quite understand, at first. The words seemed like half-drowned things my mind had to work over and resuscitate and coax, back into life.