“Adolph and I left, sir. I wouldn’t have stayed no matter what happened after all that—not with me a laughingstock of all those servants for being such a dumbbell about what was going on. And Mrs. Ives didn’t want Adolph without me, so he came too. There wasn’t any way Mrs. Ives could tell which of us was speaking the truth, so she didn’t try; but all the same, she gave Melanie as good a dressing down as——”
“Yes, yes, exactly. Now just what happened after you left Mrs. Ives, Mrs. Platz?”
“Well, after that, sir, we had a pretty hard time. We weren’t happy, you see. I couldn’t forget, and that made it bad for us; and I guess he couldn’t either. Maybe he didn’t want to.”
The flood gates, long closed, were open at last. The small, quiet, tidy person in the witness box was pouring out all her sore heart, oblivious to straining ears, conscious only of the ruddy and reassuring countenance before her.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Platz, but we aren’t permitted to learn the opinions that you formed or the conclusions that you reached. We just want the actual incidents that occurred. Now will you just try to do that?”
The frustrated, troubled eyes met his honestly. “Well, I’ll try, but that sounds pretty hard, sir. What was it you wanted to know?”
“Just what you did when you left Mrs. Ives.”
“Yes, sir. Well, first we tried to get a job together, but we didn’t get much of a one. It was a family of seven, and we did all the work, and Dolph didn’t like it at all; so when spring came he decided to take a position as gardener on Long Island at Oyster Bay, where they wanted a single man to sleep in the garage. We fixed it up so that I was to take a job at Locust Valley as chambermaid, and we’d spend Sundays together, and evenings, too, sometimes. It looked like a pretty good plan, the way things were going, and it didn’t work out so bad until I got that letter.”
“You haven’t told us about any letter, Mrs. Platz.”
“No, sir, I haven’t, that’s a fact. Do you want that I should tell you now?”