Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/308

 "She admitted it."

"Well," said Hale, "well, go on. What was against the place? What" he stopped "Was she" he started again and then tried, "Has anything?"

Whittaker half circled him deliberately, abandoning his position between Hale and the door, and deliberately he kept Hale waiting. Hale's clothes lay over the back and upon the seat of a chair as if half flung, only half placed there; his socks had been flung at the chair, probably, but had missed and lay on the floor beyond it, in relation to the bed; his collar had been flung on his dressing stand, knocking over a tin of talcum powder. In a remission of Billy's intentness upon Marjorie's situation, these details caught his mind and told a story plain enough even for Billy. When Hale had returned to his room that morning, he had been in no satisfactory mood; he had got to bed and put the light out as quickly as possible; and this fixed in Billy's mind the interpretation he previously had placed upon Hale's absence last night. Billy let his mind dwell on that; then for another series of seconds he merely stood dully, hearing the street noises which came through the open windows, feeling the slight, warm current of morning air.

"A girl took poison at that place a few days before Marjorie went there; she tried to kill herself," Billy told at last. "The man who also had passed himself as her husband, picked up somebody else and had left her. If you want the exact address where your daughter lives, ask the police for the number where they went for an ambulance call on a poison case on Clearedge Street during the second week you were at Fursten's." And Billy, without circling, started for the door; he in-