She hurried down into the dining-room. Ah, Harboro was there! And again she was puzzled by his placidity. He was standing at a window, with his back to her, his hands clasped behind him. He turned when he heard her. “It promises to be another warm day,” he said pleasantly. Then he turned and looked out through the kitchen door as if hinting to Antonia that breakfast might now be served.
He ate his grapes and poached eggs and drank his coffee in silence. He seemed unaware that Sylvia was regarding him with troubled eyes.
When he arose from the table he turned toward the hall. As if by an afterthought, he called back, “I’m going to be busy for a little while, Sylvia,” and she heard him going up the stairs.
His tone had conveyed a hint that he did not wish to be disturbed, she thought, but she could not help being uncomfortably curious. What was there to be done on a Sunday morning that could compare in importance with the obviously necessary task of helping her to forget the injuries she had suffered? It was not his way to turn away from her when she needed him.
She could not understand his conduct at all. She was wounded; and then she began to think more directly, more clearly. Harboro was not putting this thing away from him. In his way he was facing it. But how?
She noiselessly climbed the stairs and opened the door of their bedroom.
With great exactitude of movement he was cleaning a pistol. He had taken it apart and just now a cylinder of burnished steel was in his hand.
He frowned when he heard her. “I am sorry you came up, Sylvia,” he said. “I had an idea I’d given you to understand....”
She hurriedly withdrew, closing the door behind her. She felt an inexplicable elation as she went down the stairs; yet she felt that she stood face to face with calamity, too. Her man was a fighting man, then—only he was not a madman. He was the sort of fighter who did not lose his head. But she could not picture him as a man skilled in the brutal work of killing. He was too deliberate, too scrupulous, for that sort of work. And Fectnor was neither deliberate nor scrupulous. He was the kind of man who would be intently watchful for an advantage, and who would be elated as he seized that advantage.
... She would persuade Harboro not to go, after all. The thing was not known. It would never be known. Her searching woman’s logic brought to her the realization that the only way to publish the facts broadcast was for Harboro to seek a quarrel with Fectnor. He would have to give his reasons.