I heard Mrs. Beecher get up.
“Are you in ernest, Will?” she said. “Do you mean that he has gone without a Stich of clothes, and can’t be found?”
Mrs. Patten gave a sort of screach.
“You don’t think—oh Will, he’s so tempermental. You don’t think he’s drowned himself?”
“No such luck,” said Mrs. Beecher, in a cold tone. I hated her for it. True, he had decieved me. He was not as I had thought him. In our to conversations he had not mentioned his wife, leaveing me to beleive him free to love “where he listed,” as the poet says.
“There are a few clues,” said Mr. Patten. “He got out by means of a wire hairpin, for one thing. And he took the manuscript with him, which he’d hardly have done if he meant to drown himself. Or even if, as we fear, he had no Pockets. He has smoked a lot of cigarettes out of a candy box, which I did not supply him, and he left behind a bath towle that does not, I think, belong to us.”
“I should think he would have worn it,” said Mrs. Beecher, in a scornfull tone.
“Here’s the bath towle,” Mr. Patten went on. “You may recognize the initials. I don’t.”
“B. P. A.,” said Mrs. Beecher. “Look here, don’t they call that—that fliberty-gibbet next door ‘Barbara’?”
“The little devil!” said Mr. Patten, in a raging tone. “She let him out, and of course he’s done no work on the Play or anything. I’d like to choke her.”