“So did I,” said Jasper, keeping his arm around me and gathering up suit-cases with the other hand. “Horrible in the city! I don’t see why people live there.”
He looked fagged, and I realized that he had been working hard and fast to get back here the sooner. He had never understood that I was not going to stay.
“I brought the typewriter.” He pointed out a square black box. “All ready to go to work again. I suppose you’ve got things fixed?”
“No,” I answered helplessly. “Things aren’t ready at all.” Hating to disillusion him, yet knowing I must get rid of my burden somehow, I threw down three more words. “Not even lunch!”
“Not even lunch?”
The full significance of a disastrous domestic breakdown finally overwhelmed him. “What do you mean, my darling? What is the matter up there at the House of the Five Pines?”
So I told him, sitting down on the empty truck on the sunny platform after the crowd had scattered, for I thought he might as well know before going any further. There was no need in carrying suit-cases and typewriters up the street, only to lug them back. The afternoon train would leave at three, and I intended to take it.
Jasper listened in silence, giving me close attention and now and then a little pat on the arm or a sympathetic squeeze. Toward the end, as I came to the part about the séance and the aura and the fourth and fifth nights, I could see that he wanted to interrupt me and was barely able to restrain himself till I had finished. Then he jumped off the truck, laughed, and said,
“Now I’ll tell you what is the matter with you.”
And because I looked so doubtful and pathetic, I suppose, he hastened to add, “Oh, it’s nothing much, but it all works out so easily; it doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to understand it!”