He brooded a moment.
“I rang up at two minutes past eight. And it was she who had put a bullet through her head.... Couldn’t endure the prospect of life without me. Oh, no, I hadn’t waited deliberately; I was merely rather rushed, and I’d forgotten the terms of my farewell the evening before. And she had waited ... at the other end ... fifty-five minutes of slow agony....”
“Well, you can understand it cured me of the habit of the effective lie.”
The girls were both silent. The light was fading from the studio. Antonia’s voice spoke with a quiver of laughing accusation: “Cliffe, dear, do I spy another and very recent wrinkle?”
Deb cried in sharp distress, “Oh, Antonia ...” for either the other had trodden with profane feet on sacred ground, or.... She appealed to Cliffe. “It was true?”
“It depends what you mean by true,” he replied with the air of a man slowly descending to earth by parachute. “I think that somewhere or other, and for the reason I have told you, a woman must have sat listening through fifty-five moments for the tinkle of a telephone bell to release her—or how could I know it all so vividly? They say the human imagination is incapable of conceiving outside reality. That the man was not myself?—an accident. Or perhaps it was indeed myself, and I have forgotten it, and in telling you this as a mere tale I’m calling truth itself a lie....”
“I must go,” said Deb politely. “Good-bye.”
“I’ll see you home, wherever it is.” Cliffe lounged to his feet.
“No, thanks,” coldly.
“But I want to. You’re angry with me. And I must put myself right——”