What they saw was Cub Sterling sitting at the same small table, a pen in his hand, writing swiftly and absorbedly in a small book. Behind him was the same big red splotch ... as if a bucket of blood had been thrown against the wall ... the same ... small medicine case between two of the sooty windows.
But before him, upon the table, was the hypodermic syringe. Her eyes kept coming back to it over, over and over, as the eyes of a bird fascinated come back to a snake. And upon his face, as he wrote, was the awful look which she had never seen there, until he held that syringe up and laughed.
As she gazed, like an echo in the distance, little things about him began to be unfamiliar. There wasn’t so much distance under his ear and collar, where she had buried her nose. And his hair wasn’t that long ... not nearly.... He had just had his hair cut ... Tuesday....
Maybe that was somebody else.... Maybe....
The glasses began slipping from her hands and while they fell, with the rapidity of a panic-stricken brain, she decided.
If it was Cub and she telephoned him and told him she needed him terribly and to come right away and he came, then it wasn’t Cub. And if he didn’t come, but stayed right there in that chair all the time....
Well, you had to know ... sometime....
“Emma,” her voice was crisp and had lost its note of friendly equality, “put those binoculars to your eyes and watch that man in the top of the hospital till I come back.... Don’t take your eyes off of him for one second. It’s ... it’s ... whether I’m ever happy depends on his sitting in that chair till I come back.”
The bent old woman took the glasses, tremblingly, and Sally was halfway down the hall of the seventh floor before the cupola was in focus again.
As she ran she debated whether to take a chance and call from the newspaper office. The open door of a suite of legal offices flashed by. She wheeled and entered. None of the stenographers was in the outer office.