She whirled toward me at that, and—well, it was not nice to stand there and see her face turn a dreadful, slow white with bluish hollows around her mouth and nose. But she answered at length, quite clearly:
“I last saw him at Corole’s dinner party. When we said good-night and left.”
She looked into my eyes for a moment after she ceased to speak, almost as if she were daring me to deny her statement. And I knew that it could not be true. Else how could her lapis cuff link have got out of the snowy cuff in which I had seen her place it after we were safely within the walls of St. Ann’s, and into Dr. Letheny’s pocket?
“Oh—Sarah,” she cried suddenly, throwing out her hands toward me in a gesture that was like an appeal and with a half sob in her voice. But as suddenly she drew her hands sharply backward and turned again to the stove. To this day the salty, meaty smell of beef boiling always brings to me a vision of those shining, white-tiled walls and the enamelled gas stove and Maida’s straight, white-clad shoulders and beautiful, troubled face.
“Tell me,” I said at last. “Is there anything you know that might help solve this mystery?”
But Maida turned an unfathomable blue gaze toward me.
“Nothing. Nothing that would help.”
And it was not until she had departed with the beef tea steaming hot on a tray that I noted her ambiguous wording.
I could not disguise to myself the fact that I was deeply alarmed. Particularly because I had caught her, and wished I had not, in a deliberate lie. Either that or that abominable cuff link had simply jumped itself out of her cuff and into the pocket of Dr. Letheny’s immaculate dinner coat.
I shall not conceal the fact that I gave voice to several expletives that made up in fervour for what they lacked in content. And I had learned quite a vocabulary from my parrot, a nice bird who died last year on his ninety-sixth birthday, unless the dealer lied, and was much mourned by those of the nurses whose rooms are at the far end of the dormitory. Owing to the night air making the dear bird talkative there was a sort of feeling against him among the rooms within hearing distance of my own.