“Why?” Dennis found his voice all at once, and the woman turned a glance of calm wonder upon him.
“That my Otto should be for nothing worried? So much to heart he takes things, and now it makes no difference. You do not think, please, that I am without feeling about the so unfortunate death of your friend. It makes me shocked and sad to read of it, but death is always sad. Thank you much for my letters, it was a foolishness that they were not sooner destroyed.—And now I must go to Mrs. Cochrane. You will excuse me?”
She rose, and Dennis and McCarty followed suit, but the latter shook his head.
“Just a minute, ma’am. Was it here you saw your husband on Thursday?”
“Yes, he came to see me. But what is this? Why do you ask?” Surprise raised her rather flat tones a note or two.
“Because I want to know just what passed between you two about our friend Alfred Hughes.” McCarty responded doggedly. “Have you heard from your husband since?”
“He telephoned to me yesterday.” The color ebbed slowly from her cheeks, then swept back in a deep flood and she clasped her hands. “Oh, do you mean that there was trouble between them? A quarrel? Ach, such a pity! Otto comes to me about nine o’clock Thursday night. Two days before I have still another letter received from your friend asking that I should meet him and I am angry; I write to him that I shall tell my husband and so I do when he comes, for I still got anger. Otto, he gets a worser mad on and he wants he should go then to Alfred Hughes, but I say to wait, maybe comes no more letters and then there is no troubles. From Bavaria I come but my husband is Swedish and such a temper he has! Sometimes I think I do not know him and six years I am married already! We say no more of Alfred Hughes and I think Otto has forgotten—did he go yet and make bad friends with him?”
“I guess they had some words, ma’am, but it don’t matter now as you say.” McCarty was watching her with a feeling of growing wonder on his own account. Could the woman be as stupid as she seemed? Hughes had evidently been less than nothing to her, she was apparently devoted to her husband and still—in McCarty’s own mental phraseology—giving him a blacker eye every time she opened her mouth.
“But it is bad luck that one should be unfriends with the dead!” She shook her head and made a little clucking noise with her teeth. “The fault is mine that I should so quickly have spoken, for Alfred Hughes got only the foolishness in his head to make a joke; not a bad man was he!”
“Well, it’s done with now and that’s the end of it.” McCarty signaled to his colleague with a quick glance. “We won’t be keeping you any longer from your patient. Is it a very hard case you’ve got?”