She handed the letters to the girl and Esther Maitland took them with a murmur. I know that kind of answer—it's the agreeing response of the wage-earner. It comes soft and polite—it has to—but like the pleasant rippling of the ocean on the beach it's not the only sound that element can give forth.
Ferguson tried to say something; he was mad and mortified and everything else he ought to have been, but she wouldn't give him a chance.
"Come along, Dick," she says, bright and easy, "you've kept me waiting which is very rude, but I'm in a good humor and I'll forgive you. There's a racket at the court—we were playing there this morning. You can walk with Miss Maitland some other day. I'm afraid she'll have to attend to my work this afternoon."
He got balky, lingered, looked at Miss Maitland, but she turned sharply away and moved toward the balcony. So there was nothing for him to do but to go off with his captor. I couldn't but look after them, both in beautiful white clothes, both rich, both young, he so tall, she so slim, for all the world like a picture of lovers on the cover of a magazine. Then I switched back to Miss Maitland. She's come to a halt, right below the window, and, standing there like a graven image, was watching them.
I never saw any one so still. You wouldn't have known she was alive except for her eyes which moved after them, moved and moved, until the pair disappeared behind the rose-covered trellis that hid the courts. Then she let out a sound, a smothered ejaculation that you couldn't spell with letters; but you didn't need to, it said more than printed pages. Rage was in it and pain and love. They were in her face, too, stamped and cut into it. I wouldn't have known it for hers, it was all marred and tragic, a pitiful, dreadful face.
She looked blankly at the letters in her hand, at first as if she didn't know what they were, then crumpled them, threw them on the ground and made a run for the balcony. She was almost there, I craning my neck to keep her in sight, when she stopped, wheeled around, went back to the scattered papers and picked them up. "Oh, bread and butter," I thought, "bread and butter! Aren't you cursing it now?" Bad as I believed her to be I couldn't but be sorry for her, for I've been in that position myself. Take it from me, licking the hand that feeds you is a job that comes hard to the worst of us.
She pressed out the letters, smoothed away the creases slow and careful and came back to the balcony. Just before she disappeared under it she stopped and lifted her face, the eyes closed, the teeth pressed on her under lip. It quivered like a child's on the brink of tears, but she wasn't crying—fighting, I'd say, against something deeper than tears. I couldn't bear to look at it and shut my own eyes; when I opened them she was gone.
You didn't need to tell me any more after that. She was in love with Ferguson, not Price; she was in love and straining every nerve to hide it; she was in love so she was jealous of Mrs. Price—and I'd bet a hat she was the kind who could love fierce and hard.
I had to get this into the office and the next day asked for time off from Mrs. Janney and went in. I found them different to what they had been on my first visit, taking it serious like they were warming to it. I'd hardly sat down before I heard the reason. O'Malley had been busy and turned up enough evidence to make them sure that Chapman Price and Miss Maitland were in deep in some sort of plot or conspiracy.
O'Malley's investigation of Price's movements on the night of July the seventh had revealed these facts: Price had taken his car from Sommers' garage at Cedar Brook at eight-thirty, not returning till five minutes before two. To one of the garage men he had said that the night being so fine he had gone for a long run over the island. No trace of his whereabouts during these hours had been found until O'Malley dropped on a policeman at the end of the Queensborough Bridge. This man said Price had crossed over to the city between nine-thirty and ten. He was positive of his identification, as early in June he had stopped the young man for exceeding the speed limit on the bridge, taken his name and address and had a heated altercation with him. From that time to his return to Cedar Brook Price had dropped out of sight. He had not been in the lodgings he kept in town or in any of the garages he patronized. Whatever his business had been in the city he had had plenty of time to return to Grasslands and participate in the theft of the jewels.