“Well, what was the matter with the lower left-hand drawer?”
“That was where he kept a faded photograph of Ellie Brezee. I used to watch to see if that time he was going to throw it away. He never did.”
“Who was Ellie Brezee?”
“A sister of Colonel George Brezee—the one that died. That was before you came to California. Mr. Cox was engaged to Ellie when he was nineteen. But, thank goodness, my concern about it is among the things that I’m done with. I don’t any longer sit at home, now, with the tail of my eye on the lower left-hand drawer while Ellie Brezee comes out for her monthly airing.”
“Oh, you disposed of Ellie?”
“No, oh, no.”
“He finally threw the picture away himself?”
“No. Only now, I know he never will.”
They were silent a moment. “I never said anything, of course; and he never made any secret about it. I didn’t think it any disloyalty to me that he should keep it. At the same time”—she dropped her voice—“the pain the sight of that faded face was to me for years—you think it supremely silly, I suppose. But then your husband doesn’t hoard up the memory of some girl that’s been dead and buried for twenty years, so you can’t understand.”
“Yes, I can understand,” Mrs. Mar answered, with an eye that saw through the wall the reconnaissance map of Norton Sound.