“He has a little baby girl now. Lives in upstate New York. We’ll be going to see them for Thanksgiving.” The woman paused and laughed. “But you don’t want to hear about that. Anyway,” she said, returning to her story, “I told him all right and about a week later he moved in. Well, we couldn’t have had a nicer man in our house—not even if we had picked him ourselves. Always cheerful he was, and very quiet.”
“You say he was quiet?” Peggy interrupted. “Didn’t he ever play the banjo?”
The woman beamed. “He certainly did. He used to play it for us in the evenings. He was very good, you know.”
Peggy nodded. “Yes, I know. Do you remember any of the tunes he used to play?”
“Let’s see now. Well, he played all the old favorites—Stephen Foster and ... oh, I can’t remember what-all.”
“Did he ever play ‘Kathleen Aroon’?”
“How did you know that?” the woman cried. “That was one he did all the time. Beautiful too. Simply lovely.”
Peggy sighed. It must have been Tom Agate. She wondered if he was still calling himself Armour. He seemed to change his name each time he moved.
“What happened to him?” she asked.
“He left us. About three months ago.”