(2) She had bursts of feverish unnatural gaiety.
(3) She didn’t look well.
(4) Several times she started to tell me something, but decided not to.
(5) She had moments of unwonted affection for me, I thought, as if she were trying to make up to me for something.
Then came, more serious and more conclusive than anything else:
(6) I waked up in the night and was sure I heard Felicia crying softly and cautiously. As I moved, the sobs stopped and Felicia feigned a deep sleep.
So for a week a secret walked between us. We put out our hands toward each other, and its invisible presence kept them from meeting. We felt the constraint as of a third person always with us, and that third person was the Secret. We asked mute, unintelligible questions of each other.
A less subtle mind than my own would have put it crudely that things were strained and uncomfortable at home.
Meantime, if the Secret sneaked around us, silent, malignant, invisible, Monty Saunders, for this was his horrid name, was obvious in every way. It seemed to me that his loud laugh rang perpetually through my house, that Felicia was always coming in or going out with him, that wherever we went he was already waiting for us, and that all the time he was engaged in eating up our happiness, Felicia’s and mine, as fast as ever he could.
I believe now that his ubiquitousness was partly due to my excited imagination.