“It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away.”
He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.
“Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?”
“Certainly not. Why should I?”
Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the lack of masculine understanding.
“Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that as she hates nothing else. Murder will be nothing, to that. And she will have to know it some time.”
He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window and looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing, cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a tree box.
“It's all a puzzle to me,” he said, at last. “God alone knows how it will turn out. Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett, whoever he is, could tell us something. I don't know.”
He drew the shade and wound his watch. “I don't know,” he repeated.
Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and looked at his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A half hour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to the night editor's desk.