"Go and tell Sagner," he said.
Even as I crossed the campus the little, fluttery, flickery, hissing word "suicide" was in the air. From the graduates' dormitory I heard a man's voice argue, "But why did she get off deliberately at the wrong station?" Out of the president's kitchen a shrill tone cackled, "Well, she ain't been herself, they say, for a good many weeks. And who wonders?"
In one corner of the laboratory, close by an open window, I found Sagner working, as I had expected, in blissful ignorance.
"What's the matter?" he asked bluntly.
I was very awkward. I was very clumsy. I was very frightened. My face was all condensed like a telegram.
"Madge Hubert was right," I stammered. "Mrs. Lennart's—business—has gone into the hands of a—receiver."
The glass test tube went brittling out of Sagner's fingers. "Do you mean that she is—dead?" he asked.
I nodded.
For the fraction of a moment he rolled back his great, shaggy brows, and lifted his face up wide-eyed and staring to the soft, sweet, dove-colored, early evening sky. Then his eyelids came scrunching down again perfectly tight, and I saw one side of his ugly mouth begin to smile a little as a man might smile—as he closes the door—when the woman whom he loves comes home again. Then very slowly, very methodically, he turned off all the gas-burners and picked up all the notebooks, and cleansed all the knives, and just as I thought he was almost ready to go with me he started back again and released a fair, froth-green lunar moth from a stifling glass jar. Then, with his arm across my cringing shoulders, we fumbled our way down the long, creaky stairs. And all the time his heart was pounding like an oil-soused engine. But I had to bend my head to hear the questions that crumbled from his lips.
As we crunched our way across the Lennarts' garden with all the horrible, rackety noise that the living inevitably make in the presence of the dead, we ran into Lennart's old gardener crouching there in the dusk, stuffing cold, white roses into a huge market basket. Almost brutally Sagner clutched the old fellow by the arm. "Dunstan," he demanded, "how—did—this—thing—happen?"